St. Augustine and the Shelf of Pretension

St. Augustine by Botticelli

Part One: Patrick’s Confession
Exciting event today – I can take Augustine’s Confessions off the Shelf of Pretension. The Shelf of Pretension, for the uninitiated, is the place where you prominently display impressive books you want people to think that you have read. It could also be the place where you put all your pretty books, regardless of whether you have read them or not. People who love books – you know what I’m talking about. You’ve got your own Dewey Decimal System for aesthetic bookshelves. You can admit it. We’re all friends here. Do you have all your nautical books grouped together? The Odyssey, Robinson Crusoe, Captains Courageous, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? …..Perhaps I’ve said too much…

Inspired by Augustine’s Confessions, I here reveal the books which sit prominently on my living room bookshelf that I have not read, but would like people to think I have read:
Don Quixote – Cervantes
Les Miserables (unabridged) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare – Francis Bacon (that’s a little joke for the literature/theater majors/minors)
And of course, War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

There, I feel a little better. You should also know that I do aspire to read those books, and many more besides. Once I finished school, I realized the joy that comes with reading what you want to read instead of what you have to read.

Once I have read those books, I’m sure they’ll still be on the shelf. They are the pretty books, after all. I’ll have to think of a new shelf name then. Perhaps the Shelf of Literary Snobbery.
What’s on your Shelf of Pretension? Confess!

Part Two: Augustine’s Confessions
I won’t do the three-fold review which I like to do, for a couple of reasons. One, I was the first person to read the copy I have, so there’s no archeological data to uncover there. Second, I don’t really have anything interesting to say about the aesthetic experience of the book – except that I hate end notes. If you (the author) have a comment, put it on the same page!

Instead, here’s some random quotes and thoughts that stuck out to me:
“It is not the infant’s will that is harmless, but the weakness of infant limbs.” – In other words, we think babies are innocent mostly because they can’t reach things or tell us what they think.

“Without You, what am I to myself but the leader of my own destruction? Let the strong and mighty laugh us to scorn, and let us, the weak and needy, confess ourselves to You.”

“Unless we could weep into Your ears, no trace of hope would remain for us.”

“Blessed is the man who loves You, and his friend in You, and his enemy for Your sake.”

“I had learned from You that nothing should be held true merely because it is eloquently expressed, nor false because its signs sound harsh upon the lips.”

“Manners that I did not want for myself as a student I was forced to endure in others when I became a teacher.”

“…They would assert that the New Testament writings were falsified by some unknown persons…however, they themselves did not produce any uncorrupted copies.”

“I was preparing to make an address…in it I would tell many a lie, and for my lies I would be applauded by men who knew that I was lying.”

“Caught fast in a disease of the flesh with its deadly sweetness, I dragged along my chains and was fearful of being loosed from them.”

“I held that the higher things are indeed better than the lower, but that all things together are better than the higher things alone.”

The famous – “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet!”

“Just as fawning friends pervert us, so also quarrelsome enemies often correct us.”

“Your best servant is he who looks not so much to hear from you what he wants to hear, but rather to want what he hears from You.”

There’s a chapter toward the end titled “Had I Been Moses.” I love it. I would read a book with that title.

“Too late have I loved You, O Beauty so ancient and so new, too late have I loved You!”

“I can find no safe place for my soul except in You. In You may no part of me ever depart. Sometimes You admit me in my innermost being into a most extraordinary affection, mounting within me to an indescribable sweetness. If this is perfected in me, it will be something, I know not what, that will not belong to this life.”

And this one sums up the book nicely:
“What thing within me could be hidden from you, even if I would not confess it to You? I would be hiding You from myself, and not myself from You.”

Trivia:
Augustine’s father was named Patricius (the Latin form of my name!)

Augustine’s feast day is August 28 (my birthday!)

Augustine was bishop in a town that shares a name with my favorite animal!

Augustine is the patron saint of printers, theologians, and Tucson, Arizona.

Found Some More...

This is the last one, I promise. It's kind of an obsession, I know.

Some nouns from yesterday:
- Chapped knee pits
- Rhinoceros job description
- Flim-flam Uncle Sam
- Granola barbarians
- Chesapeake Bay-Bay
- Never nude shorts
- Castro-mation! [This one of Brian's I correctly interpreted as the "technicolor" of Cuba - like you'd go to a Cuban movie, and it would say, "filmed in Castro-mation!"]
- Discount colonoscopy
- Lump sum dumpling
- Corpuscle hustle
- Pineapple upside-down cave
- Monkey bars (bars for monkeys)
- Man-eating raincoat [give one to your enemies when it's drizzly out]
- Cream cheese cannon
- "Who Wants to Marry a Muscovite?"
- Runaway mine train of enlightenment

If none of those are funny to you, try saying them out loud. Go ahead, I'll wait.
If they still aren't funny, it's probably not late enough. Come back after 11pm and read them out loud again.



An artist's depiction of granola barbarians

Apples to Apples

One of my favorite games of all time is “Apples to Apples.” I first played the boxed version, but one Christmas vacation a few years back my family discovered that, with a little labor-intensive preparation, you can have an even better experience with a homemade version.

The game itself involves each player taking turns reading an adjective (a word that describes a noun). Then the other players turn in a noun that they feel fits that adjective. The adjective reader is then the judge, and decides which noun best fits the adjective. This process is theoretically like comparing apples to apples, hence the title.

I know it sounds less than awesome, but it’s actually great, especially if you are a strange person who comes up with strange nouns and adjectives. Remember, a noun can be any person, place, thing, idea – even a situation. For example, “the sun” is a noun. “Inside the sun” is a better noun. “Tom Cruise’s secret hideaway inside the sun” is an awesome noun. You just have to twist it a little into weird territory. Purists might say that such a “noun” includes too many adjectives already. Well, purists are boring.

My family and my wife are really good at coming up with weird nouns, including nearly-forgotten inside jokes from the past. My favorite person to play with, however, is Brian Douglas Phillips. Brian and I share a character flaw that nearly always enables us to have a lot of fun together. We both think that we are HILARIOUS, and even if we don’t think what the other person has written is funny, we can always laugh at how much we laugh at our own jokes.

Here’s some of my favorite adjectives to use:
- Apocalyptic
- Strangely Attractive
- Likely to Float
- Almost Certainly Inedible

And here’s some of my favorite nouns from past homemade games (including yesterday), both mine and others’:
- Unlikely break-dance king
- Buttered pillow pajamas
- Laser vision catfish
- Magical talking barbecue sandwich
- The Word Find of Love
- Pickle-sicle
- Moses MacGruber
- One-winged plane that still flies on the power of hope
- Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade of Lava Monsters
-9 and ½ volt battery in a twelve-volt world
- Flesh-colored ice skates that aren’t fooling anyone
- Epileptic banjo prodigy

Feel free to use these the next time you play a homemade version of Apples to Apples!

Power and Authority

Emperor Constantine's vision of the cross.

I’ve been mulling over this for the past several days. It’s from Chapter 2 of Tony Campolo’s Red Letter Christians. The chapter is titled, “A Biblical Approach to Politics.”

“Instead of using power to mold public policies, we should endeavor to speak with authority to those in power. The sociologist Max Weber gave classic definitions that differentiate power from authority. In The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Weber explains that power is the ability coerce or to impose your will on others. Conversely, authority is having the legitimate right in the eyes of others to expect that proposals will be embraced and followed.

It is important to stress that for Christians, authority comes from sacrificing to meet the needs of others. As the ultimate case in point, Jesus speaks as “one having authority” (Matt. 7:29). He does not coerce us into yielding to His will. Instead, we come to an awareness that He has a legitimate claim to our allegiance through His sacrifices for us – especially His sacrifice on the cross.

…Jesus rejected power as His means for changing the world into His Father’s Kingdom…authority is earned through sacrifice.”

Yesterday we celebrated the life and legacy of one who recognized this distinction, and lived and led others in such a way that he could speak with authority in the face of injustice. Martin Luther King, Jr., was very strategic in the method of drawing the attention of the nation to injustice, but did so in a manner consistent with the gospel of Christ.

Many others have gained authority and effected great changes through embracing authority over power. William Wilberforce, the British abolitionist, William and Catherine Booth, founders of the Salvation Army, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi (an admirer, if not a follower, of Jesus), to name a few notables. All these earned authority in the way Jesus did – it was earned through sacrificial acts of love for others.

The greatest abuses of Christianity have occurred when the church has embraced power – coercion of others – as a way to accomplish the (perceived) goals of the kingdom. This applies to national, international, and local situations. The church loses its authority when it embraces power – because it turns away from Christ and becomes like the world.

The cross was not originally a symbol of sacrificial love – it was a symbol of power. It was the Roman Empire’s symbol that they would destroy any who opposed them. The cross was transformed into a symbol of sacrificial love by Jesus. His followers have far too often tried to transform it back into symbol of power – a symbol that the church, and by implication Jesus, will destroy any who oppose them. Perhaps the worst thing to ever happen to Christianity was the Roman Emperor Constantine’s acceptance of it (sort of). He claimed to see a vision of a cross and heard “In this sign conquer.” That sounds like Jesus, right? Constantine made Christianity cool – acceptable, and a tool for human power and influence. If you read the New Testament, it’s pretty clear that there is no protocol for an un-persecuted Christian.

The most militaristic book in the New Testament is Revelation. The word “overcome” or “conquer” is a key word in it. Here’s how the followers of Christ overcome the forces of evil – “They overcame him (Satan) because of the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony, and they did not love their life even to death.” (Rev. 12:11)

This brings up a whole host of other issues that I’ll probably talk about later. For now, as we inaugurate a new President, as some of us hope for and some of us fear change – can we commit to seeking the authority to speak to our world in the way our Savior taught us – through sacrificial love?

Can of Worms: The Middle East

If you have been watching the news at all, you are aware of the latest violence in Israel and the Gaza strip. A few years back I realized I had absolutely no real concept of what Israelis and Palestinians were fighting about, and no context for the conflict. A wealth of information and opinion is available to you, of course (hence the “can of worms” label), but I humbly offer the brief piece of historical critique that has been most helpful to me. It comes from Thomas Friedman’s 1989 book “From Beirut to Jerusalem.” It was a National Book Award Winner, and my paperback version helpfully carries the blurb, “If you’re only going to read one book on the Middle East, this is it.” You might think that a twenty-year old assessment of the problem might be out of date – it unfortunately is not.

Here’s Freidman’s assessment of what the heck is going on over there, and has been going on since 1947:
“The Zionist Jews who founded Israel had three basic objectives in mind when they thought about the kind of state they wanted to build. They wanted to create a Jewish state, a democratic state, and a state that would be located in the historical homeland of the Jewish people. In November 1947, when the United Nations offered the Jews roughly half this area for their own state, while promising the other half to the Palestinian Arabs, the Zionist leaders were forced to answer that fundamental question: What kind of nation do we want to be?

David Ben Gurion, then the leader of the Zionist movement, essentially said in effect to his nation: ‘In this world we can only have two out of our three objectives. We are being offered a chance for a Jewish state and a democratic state, but in only part of the land of Israel. We could hold out for all of the land of Israel, but if we did that we might lose everything. If we have to compromise on our objectives, let it be on obtaining all the land of Israel.” So between 1947 and 1967 Zionism lived, and even flourished, with two and half of its goals satisfied.

Then came June 1967. Israel, in the course of the Six-Day War, occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, extending in the process Jewish control over virtually all the historical land of Israel. From that moment on, Israelis again faced the monumental question: What kind of nation do we want to be? Once again, it could only have two of its three objectives.

One choice was to keep all the land of Israel, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and to remain a Jewish state, but this could only be done by curtailing Israeli democracy. The only way Israel could permanently control the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would be by physically suppressing them and ensuring that they were never given political rights.

The second option for Israel was to annex the West Bank and Gaza and remain a democracy, but this could be done only by giving up the Jewish character of the state, because if the 1 million-plus Palestine Arabs then residing in the occupied territories were allowed to vote, along with the 500,000 Israeli Arabs, by early in the twentieth-first century they would outnumber the Jews. (Current estimates as of 2008 – 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, 1.5 million in Gaza, 1 million in Israel for a total of 5 million – compared to 5,320,000 Jews in Israel)

The third option was for Israel to remain a Jewish and a democratic state, but this could be done only by either getting rid of large areas of the West Bank and Gaza or by getting rid of large numbers of West Bankers and Gazans, in order to guarantee a Jewish majority well into the twenty-first century. Since the world would never tolerate a forced transfer by Israel of Palestinians from the occupied territories, this option really came down to relinquishing territory.

Instead of definitively choosing among these three options…Israel has spent [the intervening years] avoiding a choice – not in theory, but in practice; not on paper, but in day-to-day reality.”

How you would solve this problem likely depends on which side you think has a greater right to the land. Since Friedman wrote this piece, Israel has allowed a limited degree of Palestinian self-government to exist within the West Bank and Gaza, and removed Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip. About 250,000 Israelis currently live in exclusively Jewish settlements within the West Bank.

That’s the bare bones status of the problem. Each side has embraced the identity of victim-hood. Each side has plenty of blame to go around.

But what is the solution?

Movie Moment: Violence 2 - The Revenge!!

I have mentioned before that when Jeni is out of town, I like to watch movies that I know she has little or no interest in seeing. This past Monday she was out of pocket, so I bought some of those cheap Totino’s pizzas which I have an unaccountable love for and went over to the video store.

I returned with four gems, which I watched in the order I suspected I would enjoy them in. They were:

Pathfinder


I first saw this for sale at Wal-Mart, and it looked so Awesomely Bad that I knew I had to see it. As you can see from the cover, that's a big ol' Viking with an axe taking on a Native American - with a sword.

This is an Awesomely Bad idea. If you aren’t familiar with this category, let me fill you in. I first heard it from VH1 (the Awesomely Bad “Music Video” channel). There are 3 categories: Awesome, Bad, and Awesomely Bad. Awesome things are what we traditionally call “Good,” as they are entertaining. Bad things are things you should avoid, as they are not entertaining. “Awesomely Bad” things are so bad that they become good, by virtue of being entertainingly bad.

Now, you might think that Native Americans vs. Vikings would be the kind of film set-up that would guarantee an Awesomely Bad rating. You would be incorrect. This movie was Bad. The idea is Awesomely Bad - the movie itself is just Bad.

It stars Karl Urban (most familiar as Eomer from Lord of the Rings) who as a child was the sole survivor of a failed Viking raid on North America, raised by Native Americans as part of the tribe, who must now defend his adopted people against the Vikings when they return in force. An Awesomely Bad set-up that fails in the execution.

It is pointless to say that the (very little) dialogue in the movie is terrible. This is a movie about Native Americans fighting Vikings. No one expects it win the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. What is important is the fighting. And therein lies the problem.

Amazingly, this movie manages to be politically correct and incorrect at the same time – the Native Americans are good-hearted and peaceful, the Vikings bloodthirsty and evil. But the Natives are also completely helpless, and Karl Urban (the sole European good guy) seems to be the only person that can do anything in a fight with a Viking besides die quickly.

About halfway through this movie, I realized the importance of setting up the landscape for an action scene. If you have no idea how big the swamp, cave, or forest is in which the fight is occurring, or the layout of of these battlefields, it is very hard to tell what in the world is going on. Also, you have to give some idea of how many enemies you are fighting. If in some scenes there appear to be thirty or so Vikings, and yet their number never seems to diminish, at some point you stop caring about how many Karl Urban has dispatched, because there's no way to tell if his odds are improving.

I will give the movie points for reaching new levels of entertainment in villain plummeting. (Hint to other heroes – when traversing a narrow mountain pass with your enemies, try to get them to tie themselves together.) If you take the climactic mountain battle scene by itself, we can declare success in achieving Awesomely Bad. For example, in a normal movie, if you knew that Vikings landed on the East Coast of the North America, but the mountains they are crossing appear to be the Canadian Rockies, you would cry “Improbable!” But in a movie like this, you see Vikings crossing the Canadian Rockies, and you think “Awesome!”

I find that I have gone on a long time about a movie I didn’t really like very much. Hmmm. I’ll come back later and tell you about the other movies I saw last week that were actually good.

Trivia: This is a remake of an Oscar-nominated 1987 film, also about Vikings and a native people, in this case the Sami of Norway. I’ll have to see if I track that one down.


P.S. Go see Gran Turino, with Clint Eastwood – it’s Awesome.

Epiphany Addendum: Scheduling Your Epiphany

One of the perks of teaching is that you are continually learning. Sometimes this happens in the moments of preparation, and sometimes it happens in the very act of teaching. On Wednesday night, I was teaching the youth about Epiphany, and I learned something while I was talking.

You can’t schedule an epiphany – but you can prepare for one.

I can’t decide that next Thursday will be the day that I achieve a moment of clarity, or a revelation from God about whatever decisions have been vexing me.

But I can persevere. I can pray – asking, seeking, and knocking with hopeful expectation. I can seek counsel from wise people who care. I can work diligently to put all the puzzle pieces together – that final piece is the one that gets all the credit for being an epiphany, but it would be just another piece if the hundreds of pieces that preceded it weren’t in the right place. In short, I can be faithful in seeking.

I was reminded of this from my pastor friend, who recently posted this regarding how we approach spiritual growth. Every epiphany, starting with the capital “E” one, is an act of grace.

Epiphany!

Happy Epiphany everyone!

Even if you’ve never celebrated epiphany, you’ve probably had one at some time or another. They might even be contagious…

Here’s the dictionary-style definition:
“Epiphany – Greek, “to manifest,” or “to show.” An epiphany is the sudden realization or comprehension of the (larger) essence or meaning of something. The term is used in either a philosophical or literal sense to signify that the claimant has "found the last piece of the puzzle and now sees the whole picture," or has new information or experience, often insignificant by itself, that illuminates a deeper or foundational frame of reference.”

Here’s my definition: You know in cartoons when the light bulb comes on over someone’s head? That’s an epiphany. In mystical language you’d call it “enlightenment.”

Epiphany is the Christian holiday that celebrates the visit of the magi to the infant Jesus.
It is the last of the “12 days of Christmas,” the “Twelfth Night” of Shakespearean fame, and in Ireland they refer to it as “Little Christmas.” It also kicks off its own season which leads up to Lent.

For a long time now, we’ve let the Christmas season be defined by the shopping season – starting on “Black Friday” after Thanksgiving, and ending sometime in the nebulous period between “Gift Return Day” (the day after Christmas) and New Year’s Eve.

I like the old way better. Celebrate Advent the month before Christmas, and celebrate the Christmas season till today. Leave your decorations up! You can put them away tomorrow. I really like the idea of including the birth of a new year inside the season of celebrating the birth of Christ.

And I like the idea of Epiphany – that Persian priests took a road trip to see a newborn king, and found the last piece of the puzzle that made everything clear.

For the sake of accuracy, I like to put the wise men a little ways away from our nativity scene, scoot them a little closer each day after Christmas, and finally move them all the way over today. If you already put your nativity scene away, now’s your chance to get it back out and do Epiphany right. Especially if you’ve got one of those huge, yard-filling scenes with life size people and animals lit by floodlights. Leave the shepherds in storage and just bring out the wise men. All the Catholics will probably know what’s going on, but everyone else will be mystified. Oh, how the neighbors will talk!

So, this Epiphany, I pray that you have one, that Jesus will be at the center of it, and that it make you a wiser man or woman.


Rembrandt's "Adoration of the Magi"