Second Breakfast

Alan tagged me with this meme, so I’m obliged to respond.

1. Τοtal amount of music files on your computer.
   4308 Songs according to iTunes, totalling 19.77GB.
2. Last CD you bought was.
   No idea. Can’t remember last time I bought a CD. Last album I bought from iTunes was, I think, Joni Mitchell’s “Song to a Seagull” (which I need to buy again as my laptop’s hard drive failed, and iTunes did a major bad when I tried to resync it with my PC and erased the iPod….hate hate hate hate hate). Either that or The Cure “Seventeen Seconds”. I seem to have a hard time adopting new music, so I’m continuing to re-acquire stuff I listened to years ago on tape and LP. I’m sure that says something terrible about me.
3. What was the last song you listened to before reading this message?
   According to iTunes it was “sugar hiccup” from the Cocteau Twins “BBC Sessions (disk 1)” release. I really like the Cocteau Twins (despite the fact that they are 1) not twins and 2) neither named Cocteau). Elizabeth Frazer’s voice is fantastic, and I like the nice balance they make between melodic lyricism and ambient “background-ism”. I can listen to my big mix of Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil (another 4AD project featuring Frazer, DCD’s Brendan Perry, and other related artists, relax, and get work done.
4. Write down 5 songs you often listen to that mean a lot to you.
   Ι always hate these questions for some reason. I feel like I have to agonize and pick stuff from a huge list, and I just know I’m going to make the wrong choice.
   Some favorites:
   1. Aaron Copland - Lincoln Portrait. I have this recording from “The Copland Collection (1936-1948)”, but I don’t know who is conducting or performing. Henry Fonda does the narration though, which is pretty cool. Lincoln is by far my favorite president, and this homage captures the eloquence of his words and the nobility of his character wonderfully.
   2. Dougie MacLean - Perthshire Amber. I nurture a semi-secret passion for Celtic music, and I love MacLean’s writing and orchestration. This piece is really wonderful, and the theme from the first and fourth movements is fantastic. If I don’t have the Imperial Death March played at my funeral, it will be this.
   3. Toad the Wet Sprocket - Fly To Heaven. This song speaks quite directly to questions of faith that I struggle with in a way that I totally relate to.
   4. Trip Shakespeare - Snow Days. I discovered Trip Shakespeare way back in 1990, which is one of the best bands you never heard of. The entire “Across the Universe” album is way cool, and “Snow Days” perfectly captures the essence of that rare but wonderful event — a snow day school cancellation. The best line: “Mrs. Braintree, you’re a chilly northern woman. Go home from yonder bus-stop, because there is a treasure on the ground. Mrs. Braintree it is written: “when the snows come over Dixie, all the roads are closed, the stores are loot for vagabonds.”
   5. Ralph Vaughan Williams - Silent Noon (arranged by Ronald E. Kauffman) - Okay I’m cheating here, as this is a song I perform with Measure for Measure, not listen to. Its a great arrangement of a classic art song for men’s chorus, and I think of Alan whenever we sing it. I even wrote the poem for him in an anniversary card (awwww….).
5. What 3 people are you going to pass this along to and why?
   I don’t know that many people who blog. I’m not gonna pass it along to anyone. So there.

I mostly like Peter Hamilton’s books. They’re good, complex “space opera” novels with lots of characters, interesting ideas, big conflicts, and lots of detail. Sometimes too much detail — hence his predilection for three and six part series and 800 page paperback editions. So when I picked up “Pandora’s Star” and didn’t see any “first in the blah blah series” I thought “Okay, this is just a standalone book”. And after a hundred pages or so of setup, I started to get into the novel. Three quarters of the way through it I was thoroughly engrossed, and as I neared the end I though “how the hell is he gonna wrap this up in 30 pages?!?!”. This isn’t Star Trek, where the entire galactic conflict is resolved in the last ten minutes of the episode, with time to spare for a closing shot.

But this is Peter Hamilton, and there’s another installment to come next year in “Judas Unleashed”. Stay tuned until next time…

I’ll wait until it comes out in paperback. I’ve got a lot of other stuff on my shelf to read, including a nice leather edition of the Jane Austin novels.

Okay, I think this is a really important book.

When I first met my now-husband Alan and started attending the Presbyterian church where we still attend today, I was quite shocked to discover that there was an alternate form of Christian thought and belief that was radically different from the conservative ideologies that I grew up with and had more or less equated with Christianity itself. You know what I’m talking about - Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, televangelists, “Brother, do you know Juh-hee-zus?”, and a good dose of hatred and intolerance. Oh yeah, and lots of hell.

So I was particularly surprised to find during a combined worship service (we share facilities and some ministry with an Episcopal church with a female rector) two women co-celebrating communion (Northside’s pastor at the time was also a woman). And over the past several years I have come to understand and internalize a Christianity that celebrates both the humanity and divinity of Jesus, the real Good News of the gospel, and a vision for the transformation of the world. In the process I have found what I think is new purpose and meaning in my life, and have healed some of the wounds that I experienced in my early life.

However our little church, or the larger Church, is certainly not without its troubles. Like the larger culture, we are caught up in the so-called “culture wars”, and within the Presbyterian church (and all of the mainline denominations) there is a strong sense of the “liberals versus conservatives”, and this us-versus-them dynamic pervades and paralyzes much of the discourse and action in the Church today.

Borg’s book is important, not only because like his others is beautiful and well-written, but because he articulates a “third way” that moves beyond the “I’m right and you’re wrong” dilemna that we currently face. Borg talks about two paradigms of Christian belief: an “older paradigm” that one will recognize as familiar — a focus on biblical literalism, an embracing of conservative social values, and a focus on belief and doctrine as central to Christian faith and practice; and an “emerging” paradigm that represents what is coming out of the mainline denominations — a historical and metaphorical understanding of Scripture, the embracing of more liberal and inclusive and justice-oriented social values, and focus on relationship and transformation as central to Christian practice and faith.

I don’t want to summarize Borg’s book here, but I think he definitely deserves a read by those who are looking for ways to bridge the great divide between religious liberals and conservatives, and also those who are seeking a way to relciam their spiritual heritage without “checking their brains at the door”. There were a few “holy shit” moments for me as I spent time with this book in preparation for my sermon (see below), and Borg does a good job of killing (or at least finding new pasture for) some of the sacred cows of traditional Christian thought and belief. In the process my thinking has been seriously challenged and perhaps transformed. Not bad for fifteen bucks.

In my spare time I am thinking seriously about pursuing a seminary degree and seeking some sort of ordained ministry. I don’t normally write about myself here (it feels rather narcissistic, a personal tendency I don’t need any encouragement to nurture), but I think there are some important things for me to say on the subject of Christian religion and spirituality. Here’s a start — a sermon that I gave at Northside Presbyterian Church
on February 20th while our pastor was out of town (aka “free pulpit supply”).

“Being Born Again for the First Time ”

Sunday: Lent 2
Year: A
Reading: John 3:1-16

When Chuck asked me if I would be willing to give the witness while he was away in February, my first question was “What’s the reading?” Given my relative inexperience with many things Biblical, I felt more prepared to say “yes” if the reading were one that I had a strong connection with, or had something to say about. And when we looked at the lectionary and saw that the gospel reading was from John, and that it was today’s passage, my immediate instinct was to say “no”. For of the four Gospels, I find John the most difficult sometimes, and this passage is often made central to a theology and way of interpreting the Bible that many of us (myself certainly) find ourselves sometimes at odds with, and experience our faith as a reaction to.

In the first three of the gospel books, we get a fairly consistent picture of Jesus – what he did, what he said, where he went, and what happened around him. The story is much more focused around the actions and words of Jesus than making claims about who he is and “what it all means”. We can catch a glimpse sometimes of the very real real person and personality behind the stories, one that I find fascinating and intriguing. In John’s gospel, on the other hand, we get a lot of information about who Jesus is, the significance of his presence, his relationship to God, and to a certain extent perhaps the exclusivity of his message. The first three synoptic gospels (which is Greek for “at a glance”) give us a more of picture of Jesus doing ministry, and John more of a picture of Christ doing theology. That’s an overly-broad generalization of course, and John’s is a very beautiful gospel, but it is certainly difficult.

And John 3:1-16 is the “born again” passage! As some of you probably know, I grew up to a certain extent in a charismatic, so-called “full gospel” church in Luna Pier, Michigan. My parents had divorced when I was ten, and my father, like many men of his generation and circumstance, was seeking for new meaning and purpose in his life. And he found it in spades at this small, storefront church just north of the Michigan-Ohio border on Lake Erie. For me it was an important time, as I was trying to reconnect (perhaps connect) with my dad, and also starting to discover who I was as I came into early adulthood. He went to church, so I went to church, and although I had infrequently attended services with my grandmother at her small Presbyterian church in La Salle MI, this had a far stronger impact on me than any church experience before did. We sang hymns from transparencies on the overhead projector, we read the bible (everyone had theirs, except me), held aloft our “spiritual antennae”, we had the preacher tell us about how hot Hell was, and who was going there, and why.

As far as I could tell, the theology went something like this: only people who are born again can escape Hell, and being born again meant believing a bunch of difficult things that were never really explained to me, and resulted in a magical transformation called “being saved”. Like Nicodemus in today’s reading I didn’t really understand what being “born again” meant, and came away with the feeling that God and Jesus weren’t particularly friendly folks, or at least weren’t very good at explaining themselves to 13-year-old boys. So without getting into too much of my personal history, you might understand my hesitancy in taking on this particular passage. I suppose I could have punted and chosen one of the other readings (today’s Psalm is particularly beautiful), but the gospels often speak very strongly to me, and I refused to be cowed by this most Gnostic of gospels.

Chuck rescued me almost as quickly has he had set me adrift by mentioning that “Marcus Borg has some wonderful things to say about John 3:1-17” in his most recent book, “The Heart of Christianity”. And indeed he does, and this small book I have found particularly enlightening and transforming in the short time I have spent with it, for it gives us a way of understanding where we are today as Christians, and how to move beyond the “us versus them” dynamic that so vexes the church today. For in this John reading we can find a microcosm of these very questions, and a clue to the transformations required of all of us to move beyond them into new life. So I’m drawing heavily from Borg’s reading of this passage, which has helped me to renew and rediscover my own understanding of what this means for us.
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[Its been over two months since I've posted here. Apologies to my devoted readers for such neglect. Read my husband's blog...his is much more interesting anyways! -brian]

If you have followed my reviews at all, you’ll notice that I have a strong interest in a group of writers known as The Inklings, which was a group of Christian writers and intellectuals who formed around C. S. Lewis during his time at Oxford. J. R. R. Tolkien is the other Inkling often mentioned, but there were others in this informal circle, which consisted of those friends of Lewis (and their friends) who were both Christian and interested in imaginiative literature (at a time when such pursuits were seen as “childish” at best by many). One important member of this group was Charles Williams, who had a strong influence on Lewis, and whose shared interest with Lewis in the mystical or “occult” both would become a source of conflict in Lewis’ long and deep friendship with Tolkien.

Williams himself was an editor and copyreader at Oxford University press, and his initial contact with Lewis was through proofing his book “Allegory of Love”, which was a study of the medieval tradition of Courtly Love. Williams himself had published a novel titled “The Place of the Lion”, which had been lent to Lewis around the same time, and the two men soon struck up a correspondance and a fast friendship. Williams had published, and continued to publish a number of novels he called “spiritual thrillers” or “spiritual shockers” which tended to focus on characters struggling with the problem of evil in the context of fantastic events with a particularly Christian moral tone and message (which is exactly what Tolkien and Lewis were both trying to do through their writing).

All of this is to say that while I’m quite familiar with the works of Lewis and Tolkien, I had not read anything by Williams, as his works have been out of fashion and out of print in the US. I was quite surprised to find a complete paperback set at a friend of a friend’s cabin in Traverse City last summer, and almost thought of “borrowing” them, but that seemed like a particularly un-Christian act in the pursuit of literary and spiritual pleasure. However I was pleased to discover that Eerdmans Press has starting to republish Williams work in the US, and my sister-in-law was kind enough to give me “War in Heaven” for Christmas.

One thing that struck me about reading this novel was the extreme similarity in tone and structure to Lewis’ Perlandra books (Out of the Silent Planet, Perlandra, and That Hideous Strength). The Lewis books felt very “fourties” to me in a way I find difficult to describe, but I think of movies like “Desk Set” (Hepburn and Tracy). Everything is in black and white, everyone is wearing great suits, and everyone has a hat. And like Lewis’ trilogy, the approach of the novel feels a little “dated”. Williams presents us with characters who are clearly good and clearly evil, and a protagonist (or group of them), who are faced with moral choices which they must navigate in order to survive, with self-sacrifice as the highest ideal and greatest challenge. That is not to say that I don’t think these are timeless and important themes, but Williams, like Lewis, was fond of allegory, and sometimes he comes across as rather heavy-handed in his treatment of the themes he is working with.

That is not to say that this isn’t a quite interesting and enjoyable novel. The pacing is quite good, and the story is complex and engrossing despite the relative brevity of the book. If you liked Lewis’ science-fiction (ish) trilogy [I have a hard time calling the Perlandra books sci-fi, and I don't think Lewis himself knew much of the genre to really write effectively in it, as he was way too much of a classicist], you will I think like this book.

I plan on reading more of Williams writing — two more are on my shelf now.