I find it to be one of God's greatest mercies that we are finite. This video reminds me of a lot of things, but mostly that we don't know the whole of our lives, and that is good. The nighttime scenes here are especially telling of how we only see a few moments ahead and never the whole journey. But the whole trip can be made this way...
the three year, residential seminary: Picking up the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church USA. How often does one get an 1.5 hour conversation with the PB?
This semester has been crazy. I bit off more than I could chew. I made a big mistake by taking on so much. I loved it all individually, but came to resent most of it collectively. This semester I really went against one of my core values: leisure. I hold leisure in high esteem, not because I am a slacker (which I can be) but because leisure is so very important. Simply having the time to reflect and make sense of life is the promise of the modern age, so why don't we make use of leisure? First there is this sense that we need to be productive and fill up our time. Second, the scale, not the pace which is often the culprit, of modernity is too big. We sometimes travel more in a single day than our great-grandparents did in their entire lives, we see to many images, and talk too much.
My spiritual director has assigned a time for me to stroll aimlessly each morning. I do this when everybody is still asleep, except the birds and the occasional frog. This time has reacquainted me with the pace and scale of human life: the walking footstep, the human hand.
This "getting slow and small" is the proper kind of prayer and where all theology starts. There is great lessons in seeing and experiencing a different perspective of time, this is really what meditation imparts.
Here's yet another perspective on time: objectively sppeding up to subjectively slow us down.
I'm getting into finals these days, but for some reason I have been more aware of my media diet. Usually I think if media as fat, tasty but it really ought to be taken in moderation. Indeed, in the past I have gone on media fasts, no reading of magazines, no news, no t.v. But these days I have been feasting, gorging, on media.
It is not a far cry to link the way that people use and create media and how we think about God. The best theology is a narrative, which is a media. For more on this see the Bible.
Here's a run-down of what I've been reading, looking at, and listening to:
Watch this, it's a good example of how little it takes to tell a full-blooded story.
My friend Mike sent me some comics. The first was American Virgin, a excellent story of a fundamentalist coming to terms with theodicy. The second was Invincible, the most lovingly rendered super-hero comic that I've ever read.
All this comic reading sent me back to the work of Scott McCloud, he is comics' greatest interpreter. Reading McCloud again, I just had to finally get his masterpiece, Zot!, and I did, it does not disappoint. Browse this beautiful collection right here:
If you are a snob and think comics have nothing real to offer, watch this.
Apart from Comics, I've been reading for classes, especially alot of Liberation Theology, Kenneth Leech in particular. I met Kenneth Leech when I interviewed at Sewanee, I think he is my hero.
I've also been getting into the Gospel according to John, in the greek. Instead of the blazing speed that I need get through the material for my classes, when I go through John, with my professor we go slow, sometimes spending 15-30 minutes on a single word. I always thought of John as strictly a theological document, but now i see it as a midrash on the Old Testament, told from this side of the Resurrection.
There is also this blog, and this blog, and don't forget this one.
Also I've been playing a storytelling game, over email, my friend Jonathan created. It has taught me about economy of language to convey as much information as possible, a technigue many preachers could learn alot from
There's alot more, but as you can see I've been a glutton...
