Christian discernment comes down to two options:
Are you going to the cross
or coming out of the tomb?
WE ARE MOVING!
11 years ago
On Reading Scripture
Many of us who read scripture and want to honor it as a special sort of text, a text somehow set apart from all others, spend a great deal of time discerning how we should read such a text. As a result, we come to scripture with expectations about what scripture is and what it should do to us or for us. Put another way: we confess that scripture is the word of God before we ever sit down and read it.
Yet it seems to me that this confession should come after we have read. We should read our bibles the way we would read any other book, with questions and curiosity, eager to find some pattern of words that truthfully names reality and excites our thought. Because it is only as we take our bible down from its own secluded shelf and place it among The Republic, and Macbeth, and Brothers Karamazov , and the Collected Poems of Robert Frost that we begin to understand what a treasure it is. Just as the centurion crucified Jesus as another common criminal and only then recognized him as the Son of God, so we read the bible as another common text and only then recognize it as the word of God.
Yet it seems to me that this confession should come after we have read. We should read our bibles the way we would read any other book, with questions and curiosity, eager to find some pattern of words that truthfully names reality and excites our thought. Because it is only as we take our bible down from its own secluded shelf and place it among The Republic, and Macbeth, and Brothers Karamazov , and the Collected Poems of Robert Frost that we begin to understand what a treasure it is. Just as the centurion crucified Jesus as another common criminal and only then recognized him as the Son of God, so we read the bible as another common text and only then recognize it as the word of God.
"Human Beauty" by Albert Goldbarth
I was perusing poetryfoundation.org
and came across this poem. I love the beautiful way in which the author explores our attempts, with language and symbol, to capture and name beauty. The narrative ending in particular is lovely and thought-provoking.
----------
If you write a poem about love ...
the love is a bird,
the poem is an origami bird.
If you write a poem about death ...
the death is a terrible fire,
the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames
you feed to the fire.
We can see, in these, the space between
our gestures and the power they address
—an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty,
a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm
from out of nowhere hit New York one night
in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught
unloading props: a box
of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped
and broken open, and that flash of white
confetti was lost
inside what it was a praise of.
and came across this poem. I love the beautiful way in which the author explores our attempts, with language and symbol, to capture and name beauty. The narrative ending in particular is lovely and thought-provoking.
----------
If you write a poem about love ...
the love is a bird,
the poem is an origami bird.
If you write a poem about death ...
the death is a terrible fire,
the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames
you feed to the fire.
We can see, in these, the space between
our gestures and the power they address
—an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty,
a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm
from out of nowhere hit New York one night
in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught
unloading props: a box
of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped
and broken open, and that flash of white
confetti was lost
inside what it was a praise of.
On the Infallibility of Scripture
I can concur, if what we mean by infallible is that we rely on the incomprehensible mysteries described in Scripture as a more accurate and trustworthy account of reality against the superior reasonableness of our own attempts at naming it. To champion the infallibility of Scripture is to be joyfully and faithfully ridiculous.
Why We are Buried
Imagine our faces
as memory decomposes
in the furrows of foreheads
and the shallows of dimpled cheeks
and fertilizes our flesh for resurrection.
as memory decomposes
in the furrows of foreheads
and the shallows of dimpled cheeks
and fertilizes our flesh for resurrection.
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