common placing

The knowledge of yourself will preserve you from vanity. -Cervantes


I prefer rogues to imbeciles, because they sometimes take a rest. -Dumas

"The beautiful is as useful as the useful."

 I'm trudging through the 1000+ pages of Les Mis and am finding it surprisingly good.  The writing is perceptive.  Okay, it's more romantic than realistic, but that's what art does, right?  We need to think about how things could be. It tests our boundaries and questions our ready assumptions.  Literature is a quiet but persistent alarm clock that wakes us up to the possibilities that lie just below the surface of our everyday experience.

I don't just say this on a theoretical level.  Reading Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life opened up the possibility of applying good books to my life.  Because a good book can change your life given the opportunity.  I've experienced the barbaric yawp and energy of reading a new book that introduces me to a brand new perspective.  It's amazing!

A good piece of literature, especially one of the long, winding novels of Tolstoy or Hugo or George Elliot, etc., will also wheedle out of you some of the internal struggles I'm working out.  For instance, I'm working out my conflicting ideas and emotions about pretty things.

Even though I agree with my uncle's cheeky observation: "the bishop seems to be the second best person ever to walk the earth." I've had this quotation from Les Mis about the bishop in my mind's slow cooker for the past couple of weeks:

.... The paths enclosed four square plots bordered with box. Mme Magloire grew vegetables in three of these, and the bishop had planted flowers in the fourth.  There were a few fruit trees. Mme Magloir once said teasingly to him: 'Monseigneur, you believe in making use of everything, but this fourth plot is wasted. Salads are more useful than flowers.' 'You are wrong,' replied the bishop. 'The beautiful is as useful as the useful.' Then, after a pause, he added: 'More so, perhaps.' (p. 38)

To overvalue utility and practicality can be dangerous.  That was one of my biggest concerns with public school.  There was so much emphasis on these nebulous yet highly quantified curriculum.  Can a teacher teach character outside of plot?

More recently, I've felt the danger of utilitarianism as I sit in my cubicle for ten-hour stretches.  Dear God, it's soul crushing!  The cream walls, the gray carpet, the felted cubicle, the plastic desk leeches my personality out of me.  I can feel myself turning into a zombie or a ghost.  I need to do more research to decide which one-- or, maybe, it just depends on the day.

So, I've started a campaign of pretty and cheer!  It started with the gnome.  Then, dark chocolate.  Now, we're into $3.99 Trader Joe's bouquets.  Also, a side campaign of a spritz of Chanel's Chance Eau Fraiche to each wrist to add some smell pretty.  And wearing cute clothes and shoes is beating the utilitarian blah's.

My coworkers were poking fun of me... especially the 23 year-old boys. But, they're starting to buy into the cheer and pretty campaign.  One day the boy who sits next to me told me, "I'm going to wear my new shirt tomorrow."  "What color is it?" I asked.  He answered, "You'll have to wait and see."  The shirt was a little Miami Vice for my taste, but it's a start. Before you know it, he's going to have something quirky in his cube too.

The core of my pretty and cheer campaign is my walk during my lunch break.  There's something magical about going outside, watching people and animals, and just enjoying the blue or gray sky, the sound of the water, the excitement of bird sightings.  At the heart of the campaign is worship: awareness of a good God and humbleness and gratefulness.  To quote VH again on the bishop:

He pondered on the greatness and living presence of God, on the mystery of eternity in the future and, even more strange, eternity in the past, on all the infinity manifest to his eyes and to his senses; and without seeking to comprehend the incomprehensible he contemplated these things. He did not scrutinize God but let his eyes be dazzled. He pondered on the sublime conjunction of atoms that gives matter its substance; that reveals forces in discovering them, creates the separate within the whole, proportion within immensity, countless numbers within infinity; and through light gives birth to beauty. This conjunction, this ceaseless joining and disjoining, is life and death. (p.67)

rough start

Yesterday, I ate a traditional Southern New Year's meal:  Collard greens (dollars), black-eyed peas (coins=luck), corn bread (gold), and pork (supposedly, pigs are the one animal that can't walk backwards-- aren't they considered really smart too?  hmm...).  The more you eat, the better your luck is.  I skipped lunch so I could eat two helpings of everything!!!

However, I did not succumb to the tradition of New Year's resolutions. The only resolution I make is not to go to a gym in January. I think they're silly because the things I need to work on are going to take the rest of my lifetime.  However, I'm trying to become a better listener.  There was actually a class on listening one summer at Regent.  My friend Tim took it; he graciously laughed at most of my jokes about it.  But, now I think at a point in my maturity (intellectual, emotional, and spiritual) where I would benefit from that class... instead of see it as joke fodder.

I decided to go kayaking on January 1st would be a brilliant way to kick off the new year. I made this decision without checking the weather forecast.  It rained... and, apparently, I'm not an avid enough outdoorswoman.  I went and got a makeover at a store-- if you can't kayak, you might as well play with makeup.

Today a belt in my car broke while I was driving.  I called my mechanic, and he told me he'd look at it.   He fixed it.  I was super glad it happened this afternoon instead of 9:30 pm on my drive home on the interstate.  

I think there's a lot of room for improvement in 2013-- from last year.  I sent a job application last night.  I'm going on a date with a new guy tomorrow.  Here's to possibility!

Here are the two quotations that I'm commonplacing for the new year.  I found them comforting and convicting:

I don’t fear that at the end God will ask why I wasn’t Moses (great leader) or Thomas Aquinas (towering intellect), but why I wasn’t myself.  -Miroslav Volf

"We have this idea that everyone should be...totally whole, totally together spiritually, and totally fulfilled. That is a myth. In reality, our lack of fulfillment is the most precious gift we have. It is the source of our passion, our creativity, our search for God. All the best of life comes out of our human yearning - our not being satisfied...." -Gerald Mays, quoted in "Water in My Soul" by Luci Shaw.


(I took the pictures on January 29th, 2012 on my lunch break.)

Watch for the Light

I can't wait for Advent!*  December 2nd: the count-down is on.  I taught a class on Advent last year, which served as a great excuse to sprinkle my blog with advent poems and such.  No doubt there will be some of that this year. 

For a lot of history, the church has treated Advent in the same manner they treated Lent; there was more longing and penitence and less  shopping and decorating.  We miss so much skipping over Advent: a punch line needs a joke.  We don't do waiting in our culture-- we're far too important and busy.

I've been on a quest for a good Advent devotional book, a guide: Watch for the Light.  In this context, "good" means intelligent not sentimental, insightful not cliche, what I need to hear not what I want to hear.

I think I may have found it... after reading November 24th's reading, Blumhardt's "Action in Waiting":

".... We live in a mass of wrongs and untruths, and they surround us as a dark, dark night. Not even in the most flagrant things do we manage to break through....

"Anyone whose attention is fixed on the coming reign of God and who wants to see a change brought about in God's house will become more and more aware that there exists a universal wrongness that is pulled over us like a choking, suffocating blanket." (5-6)

"We must speak in practical terms.  Either Christ's coming has meaning for us now, or else it means nothing at all." (10)

"The all-important thing is to keep your eyes on what comes from God and to make way for it to come into being here on earth. If you always try to be heavenly and spiritually minded, you won't understand the everyday work God has for you to do...." (12)

Humble thyself.  "Because a transformation of this scale can never be achieved by human means, but only by divine intervention, Advent (to quote Bonhoeffer again) might be compared to a prison cell 'in which one waits and hope and does various unessential things... but is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside.' It is a fitting metaphor. But dependency does not release us from responsibility. If the essence of Advent is expectancy, it is also readiness for action: watchfulness for every opening, and willingness to risk everything for freedom and a new beginning." (xvi)

I like how the writers lean into the tension of watching and willingness.  In fact, I need it.

I'll close with the poem the book opens:

Lo, in the silent night

A child to God is born

And all is brought again

That ere was lost or lorn.

Could but thy soul, O man,

Become a silent night!

God would be born in thee

And set all things aright!

                              15th Century

*Haha, a little Advent humor.

A Collect for Fridays... and Mand ;)

Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen.
(A Collect for Fridays, Morning Prayer II in the Common Book of Prayer)

This collect states the difference between Jesus and Oprah.  Maybe there's more to life than being nice, happy, and comfortable.  Maybe we're a little more broken than we let on. Then again, maybe I haven't done enough navel gazing recently.

And, since it's Thanksgiving, one more from the Book of Common Prayer-- it's got a little kick:

The General Thanksgiving

Almighty God, Father of all mercies,
we your unworthy servants give you humble thanks
for all your goodness and loving-kindness
to us and to all whom you have made.
We bless you for your creation, preservation,
and all the blessings of this life;
but above all for your immeasurable love
in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ;
for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory.
And, we pray, give us such an awareness of your mercies,
that with truly thankful hearts we may show forth your praise,
not only with our lips, but in our lives,
by giving up our selves to your service,
and by walking before you
in holiness and righteousness all our days;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit,
be honor and glory throughout the ages. Amen.

commonplacing for this week

"It is important to note that 'the valley of the shadow of death' is as much God's right path for us as the 'green pastures' which lie beside 'quiet waters.'"
James M. Boice

“Such is the depth of the Christian Scriptures that even if I were attempting to study them and nothing else from early boyhood to decrepit old age, with the utmost leisure, the most unwearied zeal, and talents greater than I have, I would still daily be making progress in discovering their treasures.”
St. Augustine

"CHALLENGE:
NAME THE MOST COUNTER-CULTURAL TEXT IN THE BIBLE

My vote:
"What do you have that you did not receive?" (meaning: nothing) (1 Corinthians 4:7)"
Miroslav Volf

"... it only takes about 90 hours to read through the Bible. This means that if we replace our average daily television watching, which Nielsen reports is 4 hours and 39 minutes, with Bible reading, we could read the entire Bible in less than 3 weeks."
Bethany Jenkins

The Bible is on the brain, especially since I said that Thomas walked on water in a class... that I was teaching. I faked a few people out with that one.  I should have said "one of the twelve" or the "dude".

Then, there's always poetry: Looking, Walking, Being

Great things

"Expect great things from God.  Attempt great things for God." -William Carey

What are your expectations from God?  What are you attempting for God?  This was the crux of Bill's sermon on Ruth 3:6-15 today.  Challenging stuff.

Banana Splits and other food for thought

Tomorrow (August 25th) is Banana Split Day!!!  Here's a link to a blog I follow that explores and celebrates the phenomenon: guiltless banana split in jar.  

I came across this quotation on Facebook today (Cory Booker posted it):

If you fear it, you give it power. 
If you face it, you gain the strength. 
If you hate it, you reveal your darkness. 
If you love it, you reveal your light.

Love banana splits and reveal your light!

wisdom yoda has

*

Emotional mixed showers today was. Rain drizzled when my sister responded to me in a text: "You ca n't embarrass me" to a request I had made. I'd have been fine with a "no", but "embarrass" seemed a strong and unnecessary word choice. My brother told me that I'm being overly sensitive, and no doubt that's an aspect of it. I found this article "On Taking It Personally" about an hour later and applied it to my situation. Ergo, clearly, I'm a writer (thanks, Poor Logic). Rain cleared.

I met a teaching buddy for dinner tonight. It was good to chat (there are three teachers I really miss). And chat we did: religion, politics, and money because neither of us is couth. Of course, I got around to my "business plan", which everybody gets to eventually hear about if they get into a conversation with me. I told him the name, the idea, the niche. I don't think he was overly impressed; he seemed to think it was good stop gap, which wasn't what I wanted to hear. But, that's why I like him. Finally he gave me his advice in the form of a Yoda quotation: "Do or do not... there is not try."






* http://www.maniacworld.com/dog-yoda-halloween-costume.html

muchness report

*
The Mad Hatter: [to Alice] "You used to be much more..."muchier." You've lost your muchness." This quotation and the connected theme made the new Alice movie far more interesting, and Johnny Depp made it more sinister. I digress.

But, "muchness" is a very real attribute. I think this new business adventure is reinvigorating my muchness. I'm excited and energized. I'm researching, writing, planning, analyzing... all stuff I LOVE to do! And, it may pay off! I want to become a Slasher: tutor/personaltrainer/writer/entrepreneur/consultant. Boom.

I spoke with a good friend last night. He told me that I sounded the best that I have in a long while. He also said that there were no guarantees of success, but that didn't mean the idea isn't worth pursuing. He pointed out that I'd learn and grow and that I couldn't get more broke. And at worship, our pastor prayed that God would take away our fear and shame, and I realized that I need to pray for that every day-- to pray for my muchness.

I found some cheesy quotations that are deeply flawed, but I like them nonetheless. I'm tired of being risk adverse, and it's not helping me any. I think I'm trying to live a life that isn't mine. Maybe I can't get a job as a nanny or secretary or grocery store clerk because I'm supposed to be wrestling my way into entrepreneurship-- where nothing's safe or guaranteed and I'll always be very aware of that. I'll have to pray and trust God. Yikes.

Muchness is scary! It's overwhelming to feel the possible impact you can have as a human. Imago Dei: to feel the weight, grandeur, and humility of our humanness. It would fill me with ineffable gratitude, and I'd, consequently, be annoyingly positive. And, I am excited. It is an adventure that I can take. I don't have little kids or a mortgage. I don't have a job I could lose. I'm very free and have very little to lose. I don't even own a bed.

Therefore, friends, go be muchier--free of fear and shame!


Cheesy Quotations to Rouse One to Adventure NOW:

The future you see is the future you get. ~Robert G Allen

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass. ~Maya Angelou

People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing – that's why we recommend it daily. ~Zig Ziglar

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. ~Maya Angelou

Life is short, live bold! Be heard, be you, dream big, take risks, don’t wait! ~Misty Gibbs


*http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1014759/

The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.

-William Blake

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
C. S. Lewis

If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give.
George MacDonald


Nothing but heaven itself is better than a friend who is really a friend.
Plautus

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
Toni Morrison

There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.
Thomas Aquinas

O Radix (Root of Jesse)

All of us sprung from one deep-hidden seed,
Rose from a root invisible to all.
We knew the virtues once of every weed,
But, severed from the roots of ritual,
We surf the surface of a wide-screen world
And find no virtue in the virtual.
We shrivel on the edges of a wood
Whose heart we once inhabited in love,
Now we have need of you, forgotten Root
The stock and stem of every living thing
Whom once we worshiped in the sacred grove,
For now is winter, now is withering
Unless we let you root us deep within,
Under the ground of being, graft us in.

-Malcolm Guite

Oh come, oh come Adonai

The Adonai, the Tetragramaton
Grew by a wayside in the light of day.
O you who dared to be a tribal God,
To own a language, people and a place,
Who chose to be exploited and betrayed,
If so you might be met with face to face,
Come to us here, who would not find you there,
Who chose to know the skin and not the pith,
Who heard no more than thunder in the air,
Who marked the mere events and not the myth.
Touch the bare branches of our unbelief
And blaze again like fire in every leaf.
-Malcolm Guite

Our God-with-us

O come, O come, and be our God-with-us
O long-sought With-ness for a world without,
O secret seed, O hidden spring of light.
Come to us, Wisdom, come unspoken Name
Come Root, and Key, and King, and holy Flame,
O quickened little wick so tightly curled,
Be folded with us into time and place,
Unfold for us the mystery of grace
And make a womb of all this wounded world.
O heart of heaven beating in the earth,
O tiny hope within our hopelessness
Come to be born, to bear us to our birth,
To touch a dying world with new-made hands
And make these rags of time our swaddling bands.

-Malcolm Guite

Happy New Year! Happy Advent!

O Sapientia

I cannot think unless I have been thought,
Nor can I speak unless I have been spoken.
I cannot teach except as I am taught,
Or break the bread except as I am broken.
O Mind behind the mind through which I seek,
O Light within the light by which I see,
O Word beneath the words with which I speak,
O founding, unfound Wisdom, finding me,
O sounding Song whose depth is sounding me,
O Memory of time, reminding me,
My Ground of Being, always grounding me,
My Maker’s Bounding Line, defining me,
Come, hidden Wisdom, come with all you bring,
Come to me now, disguised as everything.

by Malcolm GuiteOh Come, Oh Come. Some Advent reflections

Gerard Manley Hopkins on Advent/Waiting

“Patience, Hard Thing!”
Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray,
But bid for, Patience is! Patience who asks
Wants war, wants wounds; weary his times, his tasks;
To do without, take tosses, and obey.
Rare patience roots in these, and, these away,
Nowhere. Natural heart’s ivy, Patience masks
Our ruins of wrecked past purpose. There she basks
Purple eyes and seas of liquid leaves all day.
We hear our hearts grate on themselves: it kills
To bruise them dearer. Yet the rebellious wills
Of us we do bid God bend to him even so.
And where is he who more and more distils
Delicious kindness?—He is patient. Patience fills
His crisp combs, and that comes those ways we know.

George Herbert on Advent/Christmas

The shepherds sing; and shall I silent be?
My God, no hymn for Thee?
My soul's a shepherd too; a flock it feeds
Of thoughts, and words, and deeds.
The pasture is Thy word: the streams, Thy grace
Enriching all the place.
Shepherd and flock shall sing, and all my powers
Outsing the daylight hours.
Then will we chide the sun for letting night
Take up his place and right:
We sing one common Lord; wherefore he should
Himself the candle hold.
I will go searching, till I find a sun
Shall stay, till we have done;
A willing shiner, that shall shine as gladly,
As frost-nipped suns look sadly.
Then will we sing, and shine all our own day,
And one another pay:
His beams shall cheer my breast, and both so twine,
Till ev'n His beams sing, and my music shine.

TS Eliot on Advent

*

Final stanza of "The Journey of the Magi"


All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

*http://www.cityside.org.nz/node/642

Auden on Advent

The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
Was it to meet such grinning evidence
We left our richly odored ignorance?
Was the triumphant answer to be this?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.

We who die must demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who die must demand a miracle.


The Summons
Star of the Nativity
....
Beware. All those who follow me are led
Onto that Glassy Mountain where are no
Footholds for logic, to that Bridge of Dread
Where knowledge but increases vertigo:
Those who pursue me take a twisting lane
To find themselves immediately alone
With savage water or unfeeling stone;
In labyrinths where they must entertain
Confusion, cripples, tigers, thunder, pain.

V

Chorale

Our Father, whose creative Will
Asked Being for us all,
Confirm it that Thy Primal Love
May weave in us the freedom of
The actually deficient on
The justly actual.

Though written by Thy children with
A smudged and crooked line,
Thy Word is ever legible,
Thy Meaning unequivocal,
And for Thy Goodness even sin
Is valid as a sign.

Inflict Thy promises with each
Occasion of distress,
That from our incoherence we
May learn to put our trust in Thee,
And brutal fact persuade us to
Adventure, Art, and Peace.

Another quote

I was at church for over seven hours today! Yikes. And, I should say at the YMCA because there is no church. I enjoyed it. I read the Scripture (Daniel 4:27-37 and I Thess 4:13-18). The sermon was topical on God's Sovereignty. But, back to me, I got compliments on my reading, but I had really good material. King Nebachednezzar going crazy gives the reader something with which to work. And, I met a cool guy during set up. We went to the same university but he graduated last year; we had some of the same professors. That was nice.

Quotation: "Everything has beauty" Confucius. I profoundly disagree with this statement. It in fact makes me upset because it sounds good, but it has terrible implications. There's beauty in genocide, infanticide, AIDS, slavery? Think a little, people. God can redeem things-- that makes God beautiful not the horrid circumstances.

***Update: I wrote my question as a comment on the pinterest pin and received a livid response. (I did write more tactfully than above.) My friend said my question was absurd. But, in my defense, I think genocide, etc. fall under the umbrella of "everything". I probably shouldn't have said anything because she took it as a personal attack. The beauty in this situation is: I think I'm going to use this as the starting question for my advent class-- we are in some desperate need of some true beauty in this broken world.