A Wrinkle in Time

I received as a Christmas gift the Loeb Classical Library translation of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Marcus was a Roman emperor from the second century whose meditations (written in Greek) have survived. As I cracked the spine of this little gem, I anticipated having to strain my grey cells in order to find the parallels and analogies between the writings of a second-century philosopher-general and twenty-first-century America. Then in Book I, part 12 I read this, in the midst of Marcus' list of virtues learned from various persons in his life:

"[I learned] from Alexander the Platonist, not to say to anyone often or without necessity, nor write in a letter, I am too busy, nor in this fashion constantly plead urgent affairs as an excuse for evading the obligations entailed upon us by our relations towards those around us."

This from an emperor of the second century, read now in a time when the most popular response to "How are you?" is "Busy!" and when Veggie-Tales' recasting of the parable of the good Samaritan makes busy-ness the excuse for not helping a stranger. I look no further for relevance, and rest assured that there is no significant gap between the humanity of Marcus Aurelius and that of our world today.

~emrys

Sacred Writing

When we arrived in Pasadena and I stepped into the classrooms of Fuller Theological Seminary, I was reading from a copy of the Jerusalem Bible, a Roman Catholic translation, given to me by a friend some years before. I was told early in my Fuller studies that the faculty encouraged the uniform use of the New Revised Standard Version for coursework. Thus in the spring of 2003 I purchased my first NRSV (with Apocrypha). It went with me everywhere, almost every day, during my three years of study. By the end of seminary, it had been pulled out of and stuffed into my bag so many times that the plastic laminate had peeled off more than a quarter of the cover's surface.

But the tome carries more than scars of overuse. Unlike some whom I have met, who believe that only the printer's ink may shadow the pages of the bible, lest the punishments of Revelation 22:18 come upon them, I write often in my bibles. (I even cross out English words, though never Hebrew or Greek.)

And stuff which I consider worthy of memory finds its way onto the flyleaves of my bibles. Here is the front leaf of this artifact:

The top paragraph reads: "The Bible is not like a bookcase of oils, ointments, and pills, to be drawn on when crisis occurs and in uniform fashion. Rather, it is like a personal trainer and dietician--it shows us what techniques to mix and try, always affording accountability and discipline, in pursuit of a final goal which is higher than we are now."

Below that is a (inaccurate?) quote from the Dave Matthews Band song, A Christmas Song, "Father, with all this hatred, why do you fill me up with love, love, love . . .?"

Then the three locations of the Shema (Deu6.4-10; Num15.37-41; Deu11.13-21).

Then a yellow post-it note with phrases in Armenian, learned from Sara's boss in Pasadena: how to say "Good-bye" (manak parov), "How are you?" (inch bess ess), and "Well" (lavem).

I wrote in the table of contents where each of our canonical books is found in the Hebrew bible (Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim), and my own abbreviations for the books (because for some reason I thought three-letter abbreviations took too long to type?).

As I studied the scriptures in seminary, I marked up my NRSV, always looking for patterns, main ideas, and the nooks and crannies where the Spirit whispered.

Now, five years after graduating seminary, it's time to retire this old faithful. I have been using a new copy of the NRSV that Sara gave me four years ago (perhaps she took the hint from the curling laminate); and when I preach in Nineveh I use the New International Version because that's what's in the pews. Sara's NRSV is already more full of scribblings than this old one, and it would take me longer to figure out what these old notes mean than it would to find again their inspiration.

A Dieu, old friend. Your words have not been lost.

~ emrys

Just Awesome

What do you get when you mix up an unfinished fleece knot-pillow, one pair of 3-D movie glasses, a hip toddler and logistical help from Daddy?

Pure Awesome.

~ emrys (aka "Gaga"), with his Lady

p.s. The pillow has written on it, "For God so loved the world." Hip, yet spiritually relevant. Awesome.

The Next Installment of Adventure

Now, to share the stories and photos of days gone by, we no longer have to have friends over for tea in order to page through scrapbooks or get out the old slide projector.

Thanks to the wonders of laptop formatting and online publishing, we can print off as many of our travel journals and photos as we can pay for! So if you've been reading our blog and want to have a hard copy of all our witty and touching entries; or if you wonder what the hundreds of photos that we didn't upload to the website look like, you can order the third installment of Our Great Adventure: Europe 2006. It's available here.

Never fear, though, friends--we'll still have you over for tea!

~ emrys

Risk

I recently had an indirect encounter with a church's insurance company. We (one congregation) were told that we could not, under any circumstances, borrow the van belonging to another congregation. We could rent it (an impossibility on our timeline), but not borrow it.

It occurred to me in this encounter that the insurance company was taking the simplest path to its appointed task: to cushion risk, financially, and to reduce risk in order to reduce financial responsibility. Of course, the easiest way to reduce the risk of another congregation wrecking your client's van (and then you having to pay for it) is to prohibit another from borrowing it in the first place.

Every party involved (myself, our congregation, our insurance company, the leadership of the other congregation) was willing to take the risk of lending the vehicle . . . except this insurance company. Too much risk.

And it occurred to me: what if we all ran our lives like insurance companies, minimizing risk?

I would never drive down the hill in front of our house, to reduce the risk of running into the creek.

We would never let our daughter go down the stairs by herself, to reduce the risk of falling headlong.

Most of us would never eat anything with exotic ingredients, to reduce the risk of anaphylaxis.

None of us would ever have children, to reduce the risk of suffering weeks or months on end of insufficient sleep and abundant misery.

None of us would ever get married, to reduce the risk of domestic conflict.

Humanity would quickly decide it is better not to be born, to reduce the risk of death.

And here we spend twelve days celebrating the decision of a god to be born, running the risk of all of the above, in order to deliver us from all of the above.

I praise Yahweh for being quite unlike our insurance companies.

Merry Christmas.

~emrys

Lights of the Season!

I love Christmas decorations, and especially Christmas lights. At a time of the year when it gets dark so early, the added colors and twinkles just make me grin! Last year, this was one of my favorite photos of Gwendolyn discovering Christmas lights:

Here are the 2010 Christmas Light shots - she's turning into quite the big girl!

~sjt

Pi in the Sky

or, The Sword of Damocles.

In 2006 a friend of mine from high school went public with a unique form of art: hand-inked minuscule letters and numbers which, when viewed from afar, take on a larger form. His debut piece is Pi, the first 100,000 digits of the mathematical constant inked in a spiral. Each hand-drawn digit is about 1/8 of an inch high.


To celebrate his arrival on the art scene, Tyler Gregory sold prints of Pi, one of which we bought when we arrived in New York (for the perfect price of $314.15). The piece had appeal for both Sara and me: I enjoy cool art of all kinds; Sara was a math major in college. Late in 2006, Pi arrived on our doorstep, rolled up in a long box, and was promptly stashed in a closet. There it remained for four years. Until this week.


1,000 digits of pi take up a lot of room, no matter how small you print them. Pi is a single piece of paper 44 inches across. And there is only one accessible space in the house where the framed diameter of Pi will fit: over the bathroom door at the top of the stairs.




Having selected the dwelling place of Pi, I set to work on framing it. Two years ago a friend from the congregation at Nineveh made the wooden frame for Pi out of reclaimed barn boards. He did a wonderful job crafting them, but they have set in the corner of the living room for two years. Part of the motivation for framing Pi this week was the guilt of walking by that unassembled frame one too many times. How very sad for Tom's good gift to go unused!




Both rounds of window replacements gained me large plates of glass from picture windows. It just so happened (if you believe in coincidence) that the plate glass was the same size as Pi. Thus between the generosity of a friend and the divine providence of home renovations, a frame which, from a retailer, would likely have cost me in the hundreds of dollars cost me only a thank you and some elbow grease. Here's the assembly of glass and frame in the living room, done in stolen moments when toddler feet were not active:


After four years rolled up on the closet, Pi needed to spend some time getting the bends out. And my biblical commentaries got more use than most of them have seen in months:

A 44-inch square work of art in a wooden frame and a plate of heavy-duty glass together result in an assemblage which is, if nothing else, heavy. Since Pi was to be hung overhead and over a doorway, we procured the heaviest framing wire that the craft store peddled, and I ran double wires across the frame, connected both by eye screws and metal strapping. This baby isn't going anywhere:

After so much labor, Tyler Gregory's debut piece is ready to be hung:

It took two attempts at configuring the ladder and four hands lifting the 45-plus-pound artifact, but a last Pi found its proud place at the top of the stairs, from whence it will greet every visitor to our home:

Since our home is not an art gallery, it's not designed with optimal lighting for artwork. So perhaps the connoisseur had best view Pi from the upstairs living room:

There is a Greek legend about the king Dionysius and one of his courtiers, Damocles. Damocles thought it would be great to be king, so Dionysius gave him the position. But in order to give Damocles the feel of the pressures of royal life, he hung a sword, point down, by a single horse hair over the seat in which Damocles sat.

I couldn't help but think of that parable as we hoisted Pi up over the bathroom door. Yet I'm confident the weight of entering our bathroom will be nothing like the burden of Damocles, since we used steel instead of horse hair to hang it.

~ emrys

KafkAmericana

We just finished watching the last episode of the TV series Lost, which completed its sixth and final season last spring. When we began watching the series on Netflix I was also reading Franz Kafka's The Castle, an early-20th century existentialist novel. Kafka's story revolves around the central character, K. (whose name remains only an initial throughout the novel), who is trying to get to the Castle on the hill in the center of the town. Four-hundred-plus pages are spent on various and sundry permutations of K. trying to navigate the political, social, and legal systems of the village and at every turn experiencing frustration. The novel ends with K. lost in the confusing, self-contradictory tangles of relationships within the town, never even approaching within sight of the Castle nor vindicated in his hope of joining the Castle's employ.

The parallels between Lost and The Castle are stunning. At every turn in the six seasons of narrative, the viewer of Lost discovers that what she thinks are the reasons behind events and choices are not the real reasons. Something previously hidden, and now only partially revealed, comes into play. Part of the allure of Lost for this viewer was the tantalizing possibility--like the one a reader feels for K.--that in the end what cannot possibly make sense will at last sound reasonable. Over six seasons, the layers of plot, setting, and character development reach mystical proportions, building the expectations of viewers to a dizzying pitch.

The Castle and Lost conclude their stories on opposite poles of the same narrative spectrum. K. never gets to the castle; the plot drops off almost mid-sentence. The passengers of Oceanic flight 815 discover that they're all dead (the viewer sort of knows this for at least the last two seasons), which is as good as ending your novel mid-sentence. Despite an attempt to make sense of it all by the only character who is confirmed dead from the beginning (Jack's father, Christian Shepherd--ha!), the attempt does not hold water. There are too many loose ends for the last episode to fulfill its calling as denouement.

The Castle and Lost could not be more different in the tone of their lost-ness. Kafka wrote in one of the most depressing eras of Continental philosophy, and was working out that depression in an almost-biographical novel. The lostness of K. is a reflection of the conclusion that all authority, purpose, and motivation are an impenetrable fog from which human existence cannot emerge. Meaninglessness is disconnectedness, and hope is obscured by a blinding blizzard.

Lost concludes that the nonsensical propositions upon which the plot is based will ultimately leave the characters happy. Like all narratives written by and for American popular culture, this one ends with a warm golden light in which we're all bathing together--all, that is, except those whose contracts with ABC ended before the final season. The last scene is really a thinly veiled replacement for the "farewell" episodes of long-standing sitcoms that finally break down the fourth wall, a time in which the actors celebrate how fun it was to work together. It doesn't matter what happened over the six seasons of Lost; it was just good to be together.

Two ends of the same spectrum may be two sides of the same coin: depending on your assertions about it, meaninglessness can be heaven or hell. An American reader getting through Kafka is existential hell. Not only does the plot never go anywhere, it doesn't end happily, or at all. The same viewer watching Lost might find heaven in the process: meaningless entertainment with a warm fuzzy finish.

Of course these categories only apply for one who accepts the premise of both Kafka and Lost that it's all meaningless. If one takes a philosophical stance for meaning, then Kafka may be worthwhile only for passing a philosophy course and Lost only for passing the time.

~emrys

Climbing

I was in the kitchen working on a project when Emrys calls downstairs "Come see what your daughter has learned how to do". I grabbed the camera and went upstairs, noting that in this moment she was my daughter. This was the scene as I topped the stairs:

Leading experts agree that ladder climbing is great for developing gross motor skills for children. Usually they master this skill around three years old, not 22 months. So while she has yet to climb out of her crib, ladders now must be stored flat if there's any chance she's going to find it!

Safety First

Since scratching his cornea with a flying paint chip at Sonlight in 2004, Emrys assiduously dons his safety glasses while working with tools. Recently he broke the faithful pair that had protected his ocular gems for the past three years. And needing to pad his purchase at the local hardware store in order to justify using his credit card today, he picked up a new pair. The spirit then moved him to try them on at the supper table this evening:

Certainly he'll soon be winning awards for most glamorous Tim Allen impression.

Doing new and strange things at the supper table comes with particular liabilities these days, for you see a certain toddler insists that if Mommy or Daddy can do it, so can she. So when Daddy tried on his safety glasses, Gwendolyn insisted that she be included in what must have been great fun:

For some reason, when the manufacturing company lined out the specs for these specs, they did not take into account the petite slope of a 20-month-old nose. Strange, that. In spite of this oversight, however, Gwendolyn still managed to keep the glasses on her face, which she announced with no small measure of glee: "I did it!"

Life with a toddler is dangerous. Be sure to wear safety glasses.