To Reflect, and Remark on, and Digest What I Read
Recent ArticlesBy jay on Jun 17, 2009
What is real?
The foundation of reality is personal and rooted in the Trinitarian fellowship of the Godhead (Father, Son and Holy Spirit).
Who is blessed (well-off)?
All who live in the reality of God’s kingdom (his loving rule and reign).
Who is truly good?
All who actually love God and love other people from the heart.
How do people become good?
By becoming students–disiples—apprentices of Jesus.
– Dallas Willard
(Source:
By jay on Jun 11, 2009
Finding the Groove: Composing a Jazz-Shaped Faith” (Robert Gelinas)
Just finished reading Gelinas’ book on a Jazz-Shaped Faith–very provocative. In his chapter on “developing your ear,” he asks:
“What if every moment of life with Christ is pregnant with promise–containing the potential to be a one of a kind masterpiece?”
His book also led me to read Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s Opening Address to the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival:
God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create—and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations.
Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.
This is triumphant music.
Modern jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument.
It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by Jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls.
Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down.
And now, Jazz is exported to the world. For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith.
In music, especially this broad category called Jazz, there is a stepping stone towards all of these.
By jay on Apr 18, 2009
One of C.J. Mahaney’s most recommended talks is based on 1 Corinthians 1:4-9. He entitles it, Leadership and the Adventure of Grace. He challenges my perspective about some of those I have the opportunity to influence. In my own pride, I often complain to God about some people I lead using Moses’ description of a “stiff-necked and stubborn people.” Mahaney uses Paul’s attitude toward the Corinthians (certainly a stiff-necked and stubborn church) and suggests that we’ll lead better if we:
– look at people from a divine perspective and see that they have been called by God.
– recognize God’s prior work in their life before we focus on what still needs to be changed or corrected in their life.
– recognized the grace of God at work in this person’s journey and look for signs of grace before we look for areas that need correction.
– express thanks to God for what he is doing in people’s lives and communicate that gratitude to them.
– recognize the Christian life is described as ‘walking’ so I need to not get frustrated when people are not running.
- allow ourselves to rejoice when a person is sometimes just facing in the right direction.
By jay on Apr 3, 2009
How baffling you are, oh Church, and yet how I love you!
You have made me suffer, and yet how much I owe you!
I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence.
You have given me so much scandal and yet you have made me understand sanctity.
I have seen nothing in the world more devoted to obscurity, more compromised, more false, and I have touched nothing more pure, more generous, more beautiful.
How often I have wanted to shut the doors of my soul in your face, and how often I have prayed to die in the safety of your arms.
No, I cannot free myself from you, because I am you, although not completely.
And where should I go?
— Carlo Carretto in The God Who Comes.
By jay on Mar 28, 2009
Been reading Lincoln’s 1862 Meditation on the Divine Will (below) It’s pretty deep thinking, reflecting a wrestling with Providence in the midst of the horror of Civil War. I’m in Gettysburg today using Lincoln’s words to spur my own reflections. I’ll soon be jogging along Seminary Ridge to Little Round Top. Along that line, the bloodiest action of the three bloodiest days in American history took place on July 2nd, 1863.
The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party; and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect his purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true; that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power on the minds of the now contestants, he could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun, he could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds. – A. Lincoln
By jay on Mar 19, 2009
One of my words/themes for this year is “simplex” (Latin for simple). I’m trying to learn to live more simply–at the same time to live more attentively.
So I’m naturally attracted to books like this, which calls us to leave the emptiness of false attractions.
Albert Haase argues that the true self–one at home with God– has the following characteristics:
I was struck today reading these lines in Haase’s excellent book:
Our lives are stuffed with trifles and trinkets—a visible sign that we are not satisfied. Indeed, our stuffed lives are like the bloated stomachs of starving children. They betray our hunger, not our satisfaction.
By jay on Mar 11, 2009
Let me make it plain. I believe like a child that suffering will he healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidian mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they’ve shed: that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened with men.– In Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky
