bouncing off Mr. Stowell...

[reflecting on Ethan's most recent post]

i think that love is an inevitable response to recognizing humanity in another person. when the static of our imperfect communication and communion is mercifully broken, for a rare moment, one person gains a momentary glimpse of the quite literally glorious, glory-filled truecreated eternal self of another.

what response can there be to such beauty but worship to god upon viewing the creator's art, and what response but horror and sorrow at every mar and wound laid upon than creation and every noisome wrack and noxious fume that obscures it from perception?

i follow the creed that love is first and most important, and all faith and morality follow. remembering the concealed glory bourne by every human individual, it's difficult to want to be one of the ones burning the library of Alexandria, chiselling the fingers off of Michaelangelo's "David" and spraypainting the Sistene Chapel. remembering each other's all-too-obscured and confused humanity becomes the hard work of love, and self-sacrifice an act of nurturing and restoring that which is truly important: the work of a master artist, the rebirth and life of dead souls.

maybe this is why Paul spoke of heaven as a place where none marry or are given in marriage: when the kingdom of heaven comes, and we no longer see through a glass darkly, maybe we will have no preference. the veils will be pulled back and the Sons and Daughters of God revealed in full glory, for which all creation holds its breath. each and every one of us will finally be able to see and hear each other's true self beyond the misunderstanding, pain and hatred that alienates us in this world.

we will love all of us with the depth of knowledge that blows away even the intimacy grown with eighty years married progress peeling away the loneliness and miscommunication of our present condition and drawing near to each other.

we will no longer need to continually remind ourselves of the hidden glory in our neighbors because we will be too busy drooling and reeling at the revealed beauty that was present and unfinished all along in tax collectors and good friends and annoying co-workers and great-aunt martha. and we will spend all eternity not being able to get enough of each other.

new toy

see, this is my new buddy--
and it goes pretty much everywhere with me.

but i need a little help.

first of all--it needs a name.

secondly--it needs music.

thirdly--it needs more pictures.

fourthly--it's got a crapload of options that i have no idea about. know something cool i can do with my ipod? tell me...

fifthly--it has absolutely no recorded messages/goofy greetings/amusing anecdotes from my friends to spice up the "shuffle" option.

donations enthusiastically accepted. especially pictures of you. because then i can carry them around with me, and if they're silly pictures, so much the better.

[where i have been lately - a pictoral journey]

grandpa's house for christmas


playing Pirates of the Barbary Coast, with my awesome little brother (who just scored a full-ride to MSU with free lodging tossed in to boot...)


florida


with these guys


a wedding with these guys (hey, that's And James!)


and working eighty hours last week

my excellent afternoon of fine reading, tucked away in my sleeping bag

i think perhaps that this book could be the most important book of the next twenty years. the only comparison i can make is with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's succint, conversational, and devastatingly intelligent Social Contract--but entirely different. Quinn is telling us what is painfully sinful, unhealthy, wrong, silly, deadly, or unsustainable--chose your adjective--about our way of life. and he is calling for change.

Despite all the indicators of misery we live with--the ever-growing incidence of social disintegration, drug addiction, crime, suicde, mental illness, child and spousal abuse and abandonement, racism, violence against women, and so on--most people in our culture are thoroughly convinced that our way of life smply cannot be bettered by any means whatsoever. Adopting anything different would therefore have to be a comedown, an act of sacrifce.

"Very typcally, when people question me about the future, they ask if I really believe people wll be willing to "give up" the wonderful things we have for the mere privlege of avoiding extinction. When I speak, as I did in Ishmael, of "another story to be in," they seem to imagine I'm touting a sort of miserable half-life of voluntary poverty, donning sackcloth and ashes to do penance for our environmental sins. They're sure that living in a sustainable way must be about "giving up" things. It doesn't occur to them that living in an UNsustainable way is also about giving up things, very precious things like security, hope, lightheartedness, and freedom from anxiety, fear and guilt."

"When in doubt, think about the circus. [the circus has been touted as an example of an non-hierarchical organization where people belong rather than work, and where all the members of the organization identify with and take personal responsiblity for the business.] People never run off to join the circus to give up something. They run off to the circus to get something."

--Daniel Quinn, The End of Civilization


which, oddly enough, is about spot on how i think about (i) monasticism, and (ii) redemption. what we give up, we do not really want. what we get--is worth giving up one's life for.

fullness

i feel there is too much going on for me to take in. literally. there are so many letters i feel a pressing need to write that i write none of them at all. there are so many phone calls to make and bloggy blogs to write and movies to watch and ideas to mull over and amazing books to read and bills to pay and tickets to settle and applications to write and decisions to make and...

and too much working my tookis off and fending off the restlessness long enough to put in the kind of hours that make money. i'll be sitting on top of an 80 hour work week saturday morning. three days off and i'll hit the grind again and probably start picking up overtime again...so the promised pictures and news are going to wait. my resolution to write a journal entry every day, inspired by the author of Snow Leopard, is going to wait. riding to the post office to get a stamp for that speeding ticket is going to wait. and everything else too. i need sleep. but at least i need sleep in a good way. good night...err...morning. something...

well...

i'm here-ish. in my new room. but fear not--it's the same address. i moved across the hall to my sweet new room: same rent, twice as big, two windows AND a door out to...a balcony! i'm (almost) moved in completely, so naturally it's a mess. but instead of vertical, cramped mess, i have horizontally slouching American suburban sprawl mess. and a walk-in, bang-your-head-on-the-pole closet. a place to put my boots!

and i'm off to work again--i've got to pay for those holiday adventures which have kept me hoppin'. pictures to follow.