A theology blog? Say what?

I know, I know.  I don't post nearly enough on this blog to warrant starting another one.  Skepticism noted.

But I did start another blog.  This one is more explicitly academic and theological.  Together, these two blogs represent two sides of my personal theological project: the academic and spiritual interpretation of my encounter with divine revelation.  As I've come to see it, my academic work, just as much as my poetry, photos and stream-of-consciousness blogging, is a hermeneutic of God's action in my life and in the world that I observe.  What does that mean?  Well... I guess you'll have to go here to find out. :]

Cry, Night

Cry, Night!
You damned souls forever unmoving in your
     un-breath-ed stasis
Mind, will, imagination and love inward-turned
     Frozen now in your eternal genuflection before
     the all-devouring I.
No Evenstar can illumine here

Cry, Dawn!
You happy saints forever poured out in your
     Spirit-ed ekstasis
Soul, blood, imagination and love inward turned
     Outward now in your perpetual kenosis before
     the all-indwelling Thou
Dayspring breaks upon this eager morn.

The quiet in the loud

Today was an ordinary day in mid-June in central Texas: sunny and hot and still.  It was also my day to mow the rather large lawn at my church.  Dayspring Baptist Church is housed on a beautifully rolling piece of property.  It isn't far from a main highway and yet somehow, whether graced with a blessing of stillness and serenity or shielded by the tall Texan trees that separate its grounds from the busyness of the highway, this landscape is always quiet.

The stillness and the quiet of Dayspring's property are not merely physical.  There is an ethereal stillness and an otherworldly tranquility that is infused within the physicality of this place.  An ancient, or better yet, a timeless sanctity abounds here, as if the hills and the trees, the buildings made of stone and the iron bells, the roadrunners and the wild turkeys, the grasses and the flowers all exist in perpetual genuflection before an eternal Presence that knows them and calls them each by name.

In this place, one knows what it is to pray unceasingly; the Presence of the divine Spirit that lays thick in this "thin place"-- this place where the curtain of hiddenness that conceals the superabundance of Beauty that forms all reality is pulled back-- compels prayer.  In this place, prayer becomes as natural as inhalation; prayer becomes the simple language of one's breath.

Newsflash

I love books.
I love books in different languages that I can only barely understand.
I love books that reference other books that I have on my shelf.
I love books that enrapture me and challenge me and wreck me and rebuild me.

Cicero once said something along the lines of this: A library is the soul of a home.
If that is true, then my home, regardless of where I wander, shall always be ensouled. Praise be to God.

Artificiality of Appearance

Just today my house went on the market.  Over the last few months, my wife has been diligently devoting herself to "minimizing" the house in preparation for showing it.  "Minimizing" is the term realtors use as shorthand for "removing all things that make the house personal"-- pictures on the fridge, decorations, items of personal yet questionable taste.  The goal in minimizing is to make your home as neutral as possible-- white towels, minimal decorations, no personalized touches like photographs, religious decorations, etc.  Essentially, you are stripping your house of anything that makes it a home.

What you are aiming for in minimizing the house is creating an artificial appearance of a home without the actual content of the home.  All the appearances of a home are there: couches, beds, tables, bookshelves.  But the content of "home" is purposely hidden away; all of the very things that potential buyers long to create for themselves within those walls are deemed inappropriate to have out when showing the house.

This makes no sense to me.  When looking at houses, the last thing I want to see is a pristine, untouched, artificial environment.  When we were the potential buyers of this house, I loved that the closets were stuffed with clothes and old VHS tapes.  I loved that the kids' rooms were covered with posters and toys.  Seeing how someone else made a home within these walls made me want to make a home here as well.  The houses I liked the least were the ones that were completely empty.  Those were just... houses.  I didn't want a house, I wanted a home.

But this minimizing mentality seems to be the way our culture functions.  We covet appearances but hate to deal with the sloppy realities of actual content.  We want our houses to look like homes but without the inconveniences of clutter and disarray.  We want our relationships to look healthy but without the inconveniences of the hard and painful labor that makes relationships thrive.  We want our churches to look hip and relevant without the inconveniences of truly listening and thereby knowing the cries of people's hearts.

This is one of the many things I appreciated about Hans Urs von Balthasar.  The whole of his theology (primarily but not limited to his theological aesthetics) insists on the absolute inseparability of form and content.  He argues that, in the person of Jesus Christ, the appearance of Christ in the world cannot be separated out from the content-- the identity-- of who Christ is as God Incarnate.   If Christ is, as Balthasar elsewhere argues (namely in his Theology of History), the norm of history (and, I would content, of reality itself) then Christians have a responsibility to counter the world's obsession with mere appearance.  Christians who have any sacramental understanding know that appearance is epiphanic-- appearances, forms, are the vehicles for the revelation and the unveiling of deeper realities.  So, even in something as simple and prosaic as a house, the appearance of "home" can and should be something that opens up as an epiphanic revelation of a specific content: the reality of "home", not just within the four walls of a domicile, but within the divine bosom from which the heavens and the earth are spun.  As Sheldon Vanauken puts it so well, "Heaven must be a coming home".  By stripping appearance of its content, we are stripping form of its epiphanic vocation and missing an opportunity to reveal, sacramentally, something of divine reality.

... and that is why I'm not picking up my socks off of the floor before realtors bring people by!

:)

One

Is it getting better?
Or do you feel the same?
Will it make it easier on you now?
You got someone to blame
You say
One love
One life
When it's one need
In the night
One love
We get to share it
Leaves you baby if you
Don't care for it

Did I disappoint you?
Or leave a bad taste in your mouth?
You act like you never had love
And you want me to go without
Well it's

Too late
Tonight
To drag the past out into the light
We're one, but we're not the same
We get to
Carry each other
Carry each other
One

Have you come here for forgiveness?
Have you come to raise the dead?
Have you come here to play Jesus?
To the lepers in your head

Did I ask too much?
More than a lot.
You gave me nothing,
Now it's all I got
We're one
But we're not the same
Well we
Hurt each other
Then we do it again
You say
Love is a temple
Love a higher law
Love is a temple
Love the higher law
You ask me to enter
But then you make me crawl
And I can't be holding on
To what you got
When all you got is hurt

One love
One blood
One life
You got to do what you should
One life
With each other
Sisters
Brothers
One life
But we're not the same
We get to
Carry each other
Carry each other

One

-- U2, "One" 

Hi-larious

Love it