Happy Christmas Eve! At this time of year, the blog is usually full of ruminations on the birth of Christ (like this entry) or self-pity wallowings (like this rather plaintive entry or this poem from last year). But right now I have neither the time nor energy to be deeply profound nor (believe it or not) deeply self-centered. So I thought I’d share, as rather paltry gifts, a few links to things I’ve loved recently; you may find them interesting! ...
Now that we are in December, and are therefore allowed to start thinking about Christmas (whereas consumer hegemony would have us believe that time was three weeks ago), I am very pleased to present Splendour Hyaline’s 2006 Christmas EP, Holy Night: We Three Kings of Orient Are Hark! The Herald Angels Sing O Holy Night (To download the album, right-click the above links and choose the option to download the files to your computer.) ...
I am at home in Orlando right now, to be with family and relax during the Thanksgiving holidays. Another stated goal of this time is to avoid using the computer as much as possible so I can begin healing from my RSI’s. As you can tell from the mere fact of my blogging, such is more difficult for me than it sounds. In fact, I’ve begun to see computer avoidance as a discipline I should practice for spiritual as well as physical reasons. At any rate, it is good to be home. One of the tasks my mother has set me for my time here is to go through all my old boxes of saved school projects, mementos, love letters, etc., and to vaguely scrapbook them. (For me, “scrapbooking” involves putting things into a binder).
(Last night, in the swirling waters of the hottúb, I had the opportunity to reflect for a while on reflection. Can there be anything more reflexive? No, indeed there can’t. I was thinking about the various processes of reflection that I’ve engaged in during my life, some more important and some less so, and it struck me that these times were always of immense value, though they were maybe attended (at the time) by strife, uncertainty, and even despair. I wanted, therefore, to define and recommend a life of reflection in an essay, which follows. But first, a disclaimer: to encourage certain types of detractors to read further, I need to say that I am not recommending a life solely consisting of reflection, of course–rather, I am recommending a life that appropriately integrates reflection, whatever “appropriate” means. I feel the need to write, not to settle what portion of life should be deliberation and what portion action, if these can even be meaningfully separated, but instead out of an observation that our culture certainly stifles reflection, and out of a desire to see that force balanced). A Call to Reflection
It’s been a while. I hope you all enjoyed the rush of non-catch-up-style blogs, with actual content! (Be it poetic, scientific, or theological) That time is over. Now for some random notes: 1. Over the past few years I’ve been giving myself what’s called “repetitive stress syndrome” in my hands and arms from excessive computing. It has now flowered into something extremely painful, almost what I’d call debilitating (at least for computer work). It’s frustrating because I need to work on my computer to make money to live, but that work hurts my body, which in turn impairs the amount of time that I can work, so I make less money, so I need to work more, etc… I’m trying to figure out how to get out of the cycle for enough time to heal. On another whiney note, similar problems are plaguing my lower extremities, so my usual pick-me-ups of quick 6-mile (or even 1-mile) runs are now no longer options. Thus I sit around and think how I wish I could either work or play, but can’t do either. On the bright side, I can read, and I’ve been doing a lot of that. ...
And now, the shorter, more poetic, and (I think) more important cousin to my earlier essay: The Earth That Was (We Who Were) Mountains, forests, deserts, and seas, full of beauty and life. They are stark as reality but good as truth. There is freedom to explore, to go one way or another, to drink from this or that stream, to sleep now or later, to eat from the fruit of this tree or to be satisfied with the berries from that bush. Whether I go or stay, I rest in the comfort that there was no better choice than the one I just made. I trust myself as a creature amidst creation, I trust myself to be aimed correctly, to never fail to be appropriately situated for the appropriate function towards the appropriate result at the appropriate time. Right and wrong may exist, but if so, they exist as a land beyond the mountains at the farthest reach of my eagle’s sight. Success and failure may exist, but if so, they exist as an imperceptible cloud bank miles off the shores of the sea, held at bay by the unshakeable high pressure of the perfection of the land. At any rate, they are not worth considering. What matters is what is at hand, and what is at hand is pure goodness and joy. How beautiful and fine the brush of God, painting not End but Beginning, not Command but Possibility! The Earth That Is (We Who Are) The universe is a plane, infinite in front and below, but infinitesimal in width. It is a sheet of paper on edge, the cuts of which go deeper than any blade. The abstract has become the real, and the real has been flattened, coerced to serve a harsh and cold master. Life is walking the razor, the thin tightrope of Righteousness which is so ephemeral. To either side the void howls with a commanding rage, black maws agape and hungry. The line is safe but not sure. In fact, it is so thin the very molecules of my feet are sundered, falling into either abyss. I am slit, riven, sinking into the two-dimensional compression, and grasp at the gossamer strand. Oh, but it is made of sharply glistening diamonds and I am not! My hands turn to ribbons of flayed skin. How beautiful and cruel the spinneret of God, casting lines of hope that kill! The Earth That Will Be (We Who May Yet Be) The storm has come over the mountains, and has met the storm from over the sea. The land is ravaged, and not many survive. A great volcano was thrust up, and cast ash and unquenchable fire over the ruined beauty. The land is again ravaged, and now even fewer survive. I leave my shelter and weep over the destruction we have wrought. Where now the beauty? Where now the life? I stand on the plains of desolation and the sun pierces the ash in the sky. I am blinded; I have not seen the sun in a very long time. It illuminates the sludge in front of me. Look here! But it is a whisper of green, gently unfolding, a baby in the arms of mother sun. I remember the Hell where we have been, and Hope suddenly coalesces into Truth. My rebirth blasts Righteousness–diamantine no longer–into so many glass shards. With joy, I stretch my hand toward the naked and shy plant, and I sing. It responds with a movement more melodic than any lyric, dancing, unfolding new leaves, shaking brazenly in the sheen of a summer sun, an island of new in a sea of old. In a moment the buds, and before their fragrance has departed: fruit! Round, full, and inviting. I see that it is, without any doubt, good. I call to my brethren, to we who have outlasted both Ignorance and Knowledge, and with crucified wills we know what must be done. Come, Oak and Owl! Come, Pterodactyl and Tiger! How beautiful and loving the inexorable regeneration of God, crushing death itself with its power! Amen.
I was inspired after a recent conversation (on humans’ psychological relationship with our own spiritual development) to do something I have been meaning to do for a long time, namely to put into practice some of the methodologies that I considered very powerful after reading Alister McGrath’s A Scientific Theology trilogy. Essentially, I want to bring the well-known concept of mathematical modeling to bear on a theological issue (spiritual development). In doing so, I am hoping to achieve what all models are meant to achieve–an analogy that captures as much of the data as possible while providing a simple, coherent, abstract picture that can be investigated in its own right. I am emphatically not trying to define or otherwise delineate all aspects of spiritual development via such a model; spiritual development is the reality, and any model is simply a way of attempting to capture that reality and present it in such a way as to spark further exploration. That is all! Indeed, just in virtue of the fact that the model I am about to propose is mathematical, we should not expect it to speak to all (or even most) of the phenomena surrounding spiritual development, which exists in a stratum of reality distinct from that of mathematics. Still, some surprising correlations can be made, and I hope these may be found useful.
As we go through life, we gain different kinds of knowledge. Sometimes this knowledge affects only a small part of our understanding of reality. When someone tells me that she ate pizza last night, such knowledge, ceteris paribus, does not effect any significant changes in my worldview. Some knowledge, the “knowing-how” kind of knowledge (what I call “skill”) is likewise worldview-ambivalent, in that after gaining such knowledge, our interpretation of events (our perception of their “meaning”) remains basically the same, except perhaps in a specific area. For example, learning how to use a computer program might allow me to understand the purpose behind actions of other people using the same program, but that knowledge does not affect the fundamental ways in which I perceive reality. On the other hand, there are certain kinds of knowledge, both knowledge-that and knowledge-how (both factual knowledge and skill), that do fundamentally affect how we understand reality. As an example in the first category, take the knowledge that the earth is round. Our thought relationship to such objects as the sun, the moon, and the stars is completely different than that of people a thousand years ago, even though neither the sun, the moon, nor the stars have changed much. Examples in the second category can be found as well (which is what I will mainly be talking about). So far, I have said nothing surprising. It could all have been stated more succinctly: “Some facts/skills are more important than others.” No doubt anyone would agree. Now I want to make an additional claim: some forms of knowledge are of a sort that, upon gaining, are entrenched so deeply in our mental frameworks that we cannot even coherently imagine seeing the universe in the same way as we did prior to gaining the knowledge. Here is where the skill examples come in. It is easy to imagine, on one hand, a flat earth, even while retaining the knowledge of its roundness. I can form a coherent picture of such an earth in my head. Now take a certain kind of skill–being able to speak and understand English with the facility of a native speaker. Though I know it’s a completely coherent possibility that I see a well-formed English sentence while not understanding it, I can’t actually imagine seeing a well-formed English sentence and not understanding it. Any time I imagine a well-formed English sentence, and look at the words, I cannot help but understand it. That is just what it is to be a competent reader/listener of English!
Near to the end of my trip in Geneva, I remembered that I had a video option on my digital camera, and randomly decided to take a short video at one of our dinners. It’s below. The question of whether or not to post this video was somewhat difficult, mostly due to the sudden rampage of videos hosted on my friends’ blog, TrippingOnWords. Claire and Lara recently started adding one or more video spots to most blog entries, and I challenged this decision, for the following reasons: ...
If you want to skip right to the pictures, click here I just returned from Geneva, Switzerland–a trip I decided to take a mere 3 weeks ago. Every year, my parents have a business trip in late September to some international location (for legal reasons, these meetings have to take place outside the US). Since I graduated high school in 2000 and chose to attend Stanford (a quarter school), I’ve had the good fortune to not be in class during these trips, and thus was able to tag along with my folks. We’ve been to some great places–London (twice), Dublin, Lisbon, and Barcelona (after I graduated). I didn’t go on the 2005 trip, but since my work schedule permitted this year, I was able to go to Geneva. (For a few older blogs of such trips, see here for Lisbon 2002 and here for Barcelona 2004). ...