on the other vine
For those who have followed my writing and schooling a bit you’ll know that I really liked, and really used, the book Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures
He and Eddie Gibbs, have then, been my primary, academic, exposure to this movement over the years and helped shape my thinking on church before the emerging church was named. I owe a lot to their research and their questions.
All this to say, Ryan Bolger is being interviewed over at Shapevine tomorrow, January 31st, at 1pm my time, which is 4pm on the East Coast, and other times in other places. 
He’s well worth checking out.
discipline and contemplation
I’ve a wee article up over at Barclay Press, part of their ongoing series on personal devotions.
new monasticism
The LA Times has a look at contemporary communal Christianity.
Very interesting article all around.
It highlights one of my points about this movement. So many get involved in the ideals and patterns but have utterly no familiarity with the writings of monastics, especially non-Western versions, such as Eastern Orthodox. However, so many of the issues and problems found in contemporary versions have been wonderfully addressed in past centuries. To be sure earlier centuries had their own issues and problems but they also had their own wisdom, insights, and understanding that is really absolutely helpful. Certainly such reading has been absolutely transformational for me. The Spirit worked in the Bible, the Spirit worked in the early Church, the Spirit worked and works since then.
Life in Southern California
I do, in fact, live in Southern California.
Though you might not know it from the pictures I took today.
A new gallery of today’s winter pics coming soon.
winter scenes
Snow flurries started last night. Got quite cold. Got out my camera and took some pictures. Thought I might as well post a few other recent pictures from the recent weather.
It’s winter in the mountains. Love it.
From the Vine — Every Day Lasts a Year
This is one of those rare treasures of a book that hardly seems real at first. Primary documents are the foundation of history. For me this is especially true when the documents are not official political or military papers but are instead a reflection of the average person within a certain context or era.
And that is what these are. Every Day Lasts A Year: A Jewish Family’s Correspondence from Poland
They were Jewish.
But this isn’t a book about the Holocaust or World War II or Polish history. This is a book about a family living in the midst of a crisis, trying to live as they could. It is a book about the contrasts between history on a grand scale and mundane details of daily life. In these all too often mundane details, however, the specter of Nazism is ever present, even if not mentioned.
The letters themselves take up about 180 pages of this 280 page book. They are well edited and formatted so as to make for easy reading, presented without commentary except for the occasional footnote clarifying a point of history or making note of a translation or transcription issue. These are not great literature, but that is the point. They are the kinds of letters sent by family members to one of their own far away. And they are amazing insights into life.
The first hundred pages is made up of three essays. The first by the son of the letters recipient. He tells the story of Joseph, his father. While the prose is not the best, the story is well told and quite interesting. We get to know the one who is so present and yet so silent through the later laters. It is an engaging story, not only because he was able to escape Poland but also because of the immense legal troubles he had when he got to the States. The US tried to deport Joseph back to Europe just when Europe was exploding into war.
The second two essays are much more academic in tone. The first details the Nazi rule in Cracow throughout the war. The second is broader in scope, giving a background to Jewish life in Poland before and during the war.
Overall this is an incredible book, amazing for anyone interested in World War II, Holocaust studies, social history, or Poland. My only critique, and it’s a picky one, is that I felt the book was a little unsure who to target as an audience. It is very accessible to a popular audience interested in the topic, but at times the essays feel a bit too rigid and stolid. It takes a while to get to the actual letters, and at that point it is a huge shift in reading style. I almost would have liked to have the letters at the beginning with the two academic essays at the end for reference.
Again, a picky complaint. Overall, Every Day Lasts a Year is an extraordinary book, mostly because those we meet in it were not extraordinary at all but just regular men and women caught up by hell on earth.
active and contemplative
If we compare the two ways of knowing, it is easy to see that modern men and women need at least a balance between the vita activa and the vita contemplative, the active and the contemplative life, if they are not to atrophy spiritually. The pragmatic way of grasping things has very obvious limits, and beyond these limits the destruction of life begins. This does not apply only to our dealings with other people. It is true of our dealings with the natural environment too.
But the meditative way of understanding seems to be even more important when it is applied to our dealings with our own selves. People take flight into relationships, into social action and into political praxis, because they cannot endure what they themselves are. They have ‘fallen out’ with themselves. So they cannot stand being alone. To be alone is torture. Silence is unendurable. Solitude is felt to be ’social death’. Every disappointment becomes a torment which has to be avoided at all costs.
But the people who throw themselves into practical life because they cannot come to terms with themselves simply become a burden for other people. Social praxis and political involvement are not a remedy for the weakness of our own personalities. Men and women who want to act on behalf of other people without having deepened their own understanding of themselves, without having built up their own capacity for sensitive loving, and without having found freedom towards themselves, will find nothing in themselves that they can give to anyone else. Even presupposing good will and the lack of evil intentions, all they will be able to pass on is the infection of their own egoism, the aggression generated by their own anxieties, and the prejudices of their own ideology.
Anyone who wants to fill up his own hollowness by helping other people will simply spread the same hollowness. Why? Because people are far less influenced by what another person says and does than the activist would like to believe. They are much more influenced by what the other is, and his way of speaking and behaving. Only the person who has found his own self can give himself. What else can he give? It is only the person who knows that he is accepted who can accept others without dominating them. The person who has become free in himself can liberate others and share their suffering.
~Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life
Are You a Theologian?
“Theology is for me a suffering from God and a passion for God’s kingdom. For me this is a messianic passion, because it is possessed and moved by presence of the crucified Christ. For me theology springs from a divine passion–it is the open wound of God in one’s own life and in the tormented men, women, and children of this world; from the accusation Job threw at God; from Christ’s cry of forsakenness on the cross. We are not theologians because we are particularly religious; we are theologians because in the face of this world we miss God. We are crying out for his righteousness and justice, and are not prepared to come to terms with mass death on earth.
But for me theology also springs from God’s love for life–the love for life that we experience in the presence of the life-giving Spirit and that enables us to move beyond our resignation and begin to love life here and now. These are also Christ’s two experiences of God, the kingdom of God and the cross, and because of that they are the foundations of Christian theology, as well: God’s delight and God’s pain. It is out of the tension between these two that hope is born for the kingdom in which God is wholly in the world and the world is wholly in God. “Seek first the Kingdom of God…”
~Jürgen Moltmann, A Passion for God’s Reign
Hundred in the Hand
I mentioned a while back that I was chosen to participate in the Amazon.com Vine Voices program. That means each month I get a list of items and can choose two to review. It’s a promotional strategy Amazon is trying, and that means I don’t pay a thing for what I get. Lovely. I’ve been dutifully receiving and writing since August, but I’ve not been noting that here. I figure if I’m going to get free stuff I should promote what I’ve been looking at even a little more. Ever since my book came out I’ve realized even more how nice reviews and promotions are. Gives me a warm feeling to know someone has paid attention to what really is close to my heart. This is probably much less the case for companies who sent me electronic items, but I figure it’s only fair to start posting all my reviews here, not just the ones on creative works. So, I’ve some catching up to do. I realized early on in literature classes that reviews and critiques are likely my least favorite form of writing, and I’m not particularly great at them. But, I write what I can. And so here it is.
I’ll start with my most recent review.
Hundred in the Hand (Joseph Marshall’s Lakota Westerns)
“Most people who are of the Earth live according to the truth that comes from the Earth,” the old woman went on. “One truth is to take only what you need. It is a truth that was not always known, but we know it now. A nation of many people needs more land on which to hunt. We took this land because we were many and needed it. We took it from the Crow people. They fought us, but they understood that we are a nation of many more people. So they moved aside, not because they were afraid, but because they were wise… But we do not need to take any more of the land. The Long Knives are different. They take what they do not need, and I think some of us are learning their ways.” (Hundred in the Hand, p. 167)
It is a reality of human culture that we see the world through our own values and priorities. We excuse and promote and honor and abuse to fit our perspectives, making those who compete against us the villains and those who fight for us the heroes. The story of the American West has long been told according to the perspective of the white settlers who came to find what they saw as new land, and new opportunities, to spread out and find a new freedom. Yet, there were people in that land who had already found their own freedoms and life.
Hundred in the Hand is the story of the people who were already there, people who were being pushed aside as more and more white settlers and soldiers came into the land. Although, a little foreign perspective at first Joseph Marshall’s skilled story telling quickly draws the reader into the world of the Lakota and we begin to understand the events of the late 18th century from a different set of values and a different set of priorities.
At first the prose would catch me every once in a while, however I soon realized that this was being told as more of an oral tale, and in my head I tried to read it as though I was sitting and listening, rather than sitting and reading. The cadence and the voices began to live and I felt a part.
The story is not complex. It is mostly about various ambushes and preparations for these, with subtle character studies and gentle scenes that give insight into the Lakota perspective. But, in all of this we are smoothly drawn into the perspective of the Lakota, who faced the white soldiers with courage, and a little confusion.
Yet, this is not the whole of the book. About 100 pages in Marshall decides to bring in a white perspective, and so on and off through the rest of the book we occasionally see the story from the eyes of a white man, neither soldier nor settler who involves himself in various ways into the tale. Honestly I felt that while well written this ‘white’ perspective became a weakness for the book. Seeing the story solely through the eyes of the Lakota was a valued experience, and it seemed just when I was thinking along with them, I was pulled back, back into the typical stories and typical perspectives. I wish I could have gone through the whole book seeing the white settlers as true foreigners, and felt even more thoroughly the perception of the Lakota.
Yet, that is really the only negative. Hundred in the Hand is an engaging story that really is a valued addition to the genre. I look forward to reading the next book in the series.
I gave the book four stars.
