Years ago I was participating in a discussion forum in which a certain passle of Christians blathered on and on ... and on and on ... about how courtship and marriage happened or were SUPPOSED to happen. Of all the things I have experienced in my life the level of sanctimony I saw was infuriating. People rambled on about how things ought to be and how things were whether or not that had anything to do with reality. There would be an occasional smug testimony about how things aren't that complicated and that people should just chill. Often this turned out to be the pat advice given by a couple where the father didn't even show up at the wedding because he was so offended by the conduct of his child prior to the wedding and the marriage was marriage #2 for one of the people walking the aisle as it stood. Yes, it's all so much simpler than people are making it out to be!
Another case involved a couple where, as the woman outlined things, she sent "signals" to the guy that she was interested and the eventually got to handwriting letters and eventually came the big old engagement and the woman, in her narrative, described her beloved in the terms "he caught me". My sister saw this and snorted (wonderfully) that this woman had not been a case of "he caught me" she practically threw herself at the man but persuaded herself that because she jumped through the right hoops in her mind she had been the one who was pursued and not the pursuer.
I don't quite understand why these sorts of narratives get shared. My instinct is to suspect that this sort of narrative means there is something to hide. It is not without cause that Agur said that one of the things too mysterious for him to understand was the way of a man with a maid but in the evangelical circle I hung out with that was apparently not mysterious, not the way most people talked, whether married or single. To be sure some of the most laughable generalizations I have read have tended to come from some unmarried people but laughable generalizations do not just come in the unmarried variety.
I got more insight into the actual relational challenges of actual married life from Wendy's one post over at Practical Theology for Women then in all the preening and spouting done by married guys on a discussion forum over a four year period. Seeing that one simple reflection on an actual piece of scripture just makes me more furious to look back on those earlier years to see how much that was passed off as "biblical" was just the agenda of a couple of self-impressed men who wanted to be able to say they had it worked out and that THEIR marriages and families were not going to be lack all those OTHER people. It was nonsense at best and self-delusion at worst.
One fellow I know after blogging endlessly about his hatred of the weakness of others justified his blogging on the grounds that though he had gotten himself into the place where he has to manage diabetes in his thirties he was taking responsibility for his actions. Never mind that his failure to be responsible earlier was how he got diabetes to begin with, in his mind he was doing the responsible thing now and felt justified in looking down on others who, in his conviction, were sickening him with their weakness. He bought his own hype, his own bullshit. His diabetes is something he is managing now, I hope, but the fact that he saw no inherent tension between looking down on others as weak and undisciplined while having gotten himself diabetes in his thirties was something he just couldn't see. If he saw it then it would destroy the narrative he has for himself about being the stalwart one who soldiers on despite opposition from the world and sticks to his principles come hell or high water. It's not really true but he believes it, just like other people believe they are victims of abuse when they are abusers and other people believe they are failures because it is safer to not try than to try and risk even small failures.
I am not without sympathy regarding the temptation to believe your own hype. I have gone through life thinking that if I dot all my I's and cross all my T's in theology that I will avoid the madness and hyper-emotionalism I have seen in some of my family, the patently irrational impulses that lead to destruction of various kinds, emotional, physical, or financial. There is a sense in which I realize I was raised to have the kinds of fears I was eventually told I shouldn't have so much of.
If the end times are upon us and Jesus could come back any time there is no point in building a family or getting married or even establishing a career, is there? If there can only be understanding through "rhema" revelation then only the peple who already have it can pass it on, or else you can't really have it unless someone else SAYS you have it. There were times when I was told that God had big plans for me (doesn't that apply to everyone?) and that I was called to ministry before I was born. Well, depends on how one defines ministry.
These kinds of narratives can come off as dubious because other people get these memos and I don't. If you get told you're called for ministry before you were born and find that in your twenties seminary is just not practical and you don't feel called to be a pastor then what point is there in going into ministry? If you have been told that you are going to have a big ministry but you struggle to find a job to keep a roof over your head and can't find a church you feel connected to then that whole ministry thing looks like a pipe dream. In the end it begins to feel like some kind of long-term emotional manipulation better left unsaid. Let God decide what the future of His children will be.
Personally the only thing I can attest so far about these sorts of raised expectations is that they just seem more impossible and improbable over time. They stop seeming like a divine calling they are presented as and look more like the expectation other people have of you as to what kind of person and Christian you should be. It becomes suffocating, profoundly suffocating. If you don't measure up to these lofty prophesies and predictions you feel more miserable than you already felt, more like a failure than you already felt yourself to be. What was no doubt meant to be the most profound sort of blessing ends up feeling like a curse.
This is why understanding ourselves to be part of a story that Christ is telling through the scriptures can be liberating. It means that the accepted narratives I see held up for admiration by others are not finally the narrative that matters. Specious self-congratulating narratives by smug couples who don't want to admit that things are tougher and not simpler than they want them made out to be for the sake of public show don't matter. The narratives asserting that you will be this or that person because people hope for that for you don't matter. Attempts to vicariously discover yourself in the lives and achievements of others don't matter. Christ matters.
And yet even many Christians will say this but with their lives reveal a different story. A pastor who talks about how it is all about Jesus can make it seem, in his practical day-to-day life as though it is all about him, his wife, his job, his kids, his blog, his church, his "friends". A man can proclaim Christ but, as David Martyn Lloyd-Jones put it, finally be proclaiming himself. On that day the Lord will say "I never knew you". There is such a thing as a false assurance. Not everyone who gets a direct admonition from the Lord survives in the end. Judas didn't. King Saul was addressed by the Lord through a prophet several times and he didn't make it. Numerous Samarian kings were annihilated by God after getting divine warnings and not heeding them. Yet American Christians can seem more eager to trust in the calling of a pastor if there is some part of a divine narrative built into it. This does not make tha tpastor LESS called but it by itself proves nothing.
It sticks with me that one of the ways we tell ourselves the stories we want to tell ourselves and others is we want to exonerate ourselves. We prefer to be the victim in a tragic or heroic struggle. We prefer to be the ones who are not morally compromised, not abusive of the trust given us, not neglectful of the gifts given us. Well, I do not feel I have that luxury in the end. The gifts that I do have I do not believe I have put to very good use at all or to very positive effect in the lives of others. I am not someone, I think, whom people should look to and say "I want to be like THAT person."
I can't say that I have a particularly heroic or tragic narrative at this stage in my life. I'm simply confused and struggling and that in itself makes me neither honest nor praiseworthy. I am afraid to decide what sort of story I have because I don't know. Men who decide the stories of their lives can be men who wreak havoc on the lives of others and themselves when those narratives don't come to pass. As the scriptures say, men make their plans but the Lord directs their steps.
I have met too many people who have smugly decided that they have planned their steps and the fact that things are going their way means the Lord is in it and blessing it. The narratives I have been suggested to get through my life all look cheap, worn-out, and untrustworthy. Jesus, however, does not seem cheap to me, even though I would be the first person to say I would not want anyone to consider me an exmplary Christian. I often feel like a failure because I beleive I am a failure. I have heard people say with their mouths "Jesus is what matters" and live with their lives statements that say, "My career matters" or "My being married matters" or "My being an individual matters" or "My integrity and honor matters".
I have met people who say that grace can't be explained and has to simply be experienced, as though that excused them from attempting to explain what the mercy of the Lord is, as though Jesus' parables didn't illustrate what that graciousness looks like, as if Jesus' life somehow didn't display that for us. The narrative shared becomes an excuse to not reveal the good news of Christ beyond waiting for other people to somehow "get it". If grace cannot be explained but only experienced why do we have biblical books? Why did people come to know Christ through the reading of the scriptures? If grace cannot be explained but only experienced there wouldn't be four gospels instead of none, would there? If grace cannot be merely explained but must ALSO be experienced then who will demonstrate that graciousness of the Lord to others? As Paul put it so eloquently and urgently, how will they come to faith if they have not heard and how will they hear if no one is sent to speak to them? Who will tell them the story of Christ? Perhaps we are having more fun telling stories that exonerate us than stories that reveal our need for the Lord. It is something I am struggling with.
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Johann Hari overviews two biographies of Ayn Rand at Slate
http://www.slate.com/id/2233966/
I have had a few people I know get into Ayn Rand, which I consider a sign of their mental and emotional weakness. I am not kidding and I am not underplaying my assessment of their character. It has been my observation that Rand fans are, alas, often essentially parasitic in their capacities. Learning as I go that Rand was an amphetamine addict and prone to paranoia hardly endears her to me. As a friend of mine put it, Rand's mistake was to react to radical collectivism with a radical individualism that is simply the mirror image of the communist problem. And, as Hari observes it as well, it is hardly unusual to notice that more than one person considers that over-reaction significant.
A woman who trafficked in ad hominems regarding those she regarded as lesser people vitiates the power of her critique by having been an amphetamine addict. A woman who died of lung cancer and dismissed research that suggested the harmful effects of smoking vitiates her position of saying that people should only act toward rational self-interest. A woman who claims that sexual bonds are based on intellectual agreement could not abide her lover (25 years younger) falling in love with another woman (10 years younger than he) is someone who did not, perhaps, adequately realize that we have bodies as well as minds. Despite an attempt to articulate that there is no separation between mind and body Rand may have missed the boat when a man twenty-five years younger than she was responsive to a younger and (very probably) more physically attractive and emotionally stable woman.
The ways in which Rand's addictions and paranoia ravaged her reveal that the gap between her convictions and her life was pretty big in the end. Rather than stop smoking because there was evidence it was killing her she dismissed as communist propaganda? That might be comparable to someone going on and on about despising the weakness and lack of discipline about others while eating his way into diabetes. It's the same sort of hypocrisy and it is only hypocrisy because there is no room for graciousness or sympathy for those who are mastered by their appetites. A person who does what they don't really want to do is just someone caught in the vise of what Paul describes in Romans 7, and that's just basically almost anyone. Dying alone but for someone who is only there to care for you because you pay them to might have been success to Rand but it is not heroism in the end, was it?
Even a cursory examination of her life reveals that she was in essential respects a sociopath and her assessment of the human condition marred by a form of class resentment she never overcome. As more than a few people noted Rand was profoundly immoral and, as some have noted, a hypocrite. Her capacity for unfettered dualism and rancor has been surpassed, I suppose, but she is emblematic of a person whose ideas are as bad as the intellectual disease she proposed to cure.
What I have found sad about the admirers of Rand I have known in my relatively short life is how their lives are at odds with their admiration of her work and the values they claim to adhere to. I have seen people who have homes because of the generosity of other people, who have places to stay and in some cases jobs because of the gestures of family and friends. Christians embracing Rand's philosophy is an exercise in peculiarity since Rand's philosophy does not seem to have any use for children and would appear to condone abortion of convenience. If, as some of my Rand-swilling associates contend, integrity and dignity are not inherent and must be earned then there is no basis for allowing a fetus to survive into adulthood if there are "rational" goals for which it is better to sacrifice the unborn. Indeed, the very nature of parenting itself suggests that Rand completely misunderstood the strange and mysterious nexus of selfishness and selflessness.
Most Rand fans I have met are, frankly, the kinds of "looters" who live off the generosity of others and are not particularly productive people that Rand would have despised. They are useless as artists, as writers, and work at relatively menial tasks that can easily be done by others, yet they seem to aspire to being greater than that even though it is not in them. They find comfort in looking down on people who are actually better than them while thinking the roles are reversed.
I don't say this as though I were someone great but because I have observed these people for enough years to see that their convictions of being better than the average herdm, or even merely their belief that they ASPIRE to be better than the common herd, are so manifestly refuted by their wretchedness in actual living that if I were an actual Randian I would be obliged to tell them they are losers whose self-delusion about even their mere competence dooms them to lives of useless parasitism rather than productive work. I am, however, a Christian who thinks that even if this assessment about those people is true I'd rather let them discover their smallness through their attempts at propounding their greatness. I don't need to tell them they are nobodies, the power of the market and their more or less insignificant place within it will eventually tell them that! They will be destroyed by their own folly. We all are eventually. Rand certainly was.
As a review in the National Review put it so long ago, even where one can agree with Rand's assessment of problems, her solution is tantamount to proposing that the way to ensure the failures of doctors are dealt with is by renouncing the Hippocratic oath. Liberals have been claiming for years that the current economic meltdown we are facing is because Rand fans were allowed to have their day during the administration of Bush 2. I am not sure that is all there is to be said on the subject.
I have had a few people I know get into Ayn Rand, which I consider a sign of their mental and emotional weakness. I am not kidding and I am not underplaying my assessment of their character. It has been my observation that Rand fans are, alas, often essentially parasitic in their capacities. Learning as I go that Rand was an amphetamine addict and prone to paranoia hardly endears her to me. As a friend of mine put it, Rand's mistake was to react to radical collectivism with a radical individualism that is simply the mirror image of the communist problem. And, as Hari observes it as well, it is hardly unusual to notice that more than one person considers that over-reaction significant.
A woman who trafficked in ad hominems regarding those she regarded as lesser people vitiates the power of her critique by having been an amphetamine addict. A woman who died of lung cancer and dismissed research that suggested the harmful effects of smoking vitiates her position of saying that people should only act toward rational self-interest. A woman who claims that sexual bonds are based on intellectual agreement could not abide her lover (25 years younger) falling in love with another woman (10 years younger than he) is someone who did not, perhaps, adequately realize that we have bodies as well as minds. Despite an attempt to articulate that there is no separation between mind and body Rand may have missed the boat when a man twenty-five years younger than she was responsive to a younger and (very probably) more physically attractive and emotionally stable woman.
The ways in which Rand's addictions and paranoia ravaged her reveal that the gap between her convictions and her life was pretty big in the end. Rather than stop smoking because there was evidence it was killing her she dismissed as communist propaganda? That might be comparable to someone going on and on about despising the weakness and lack of discipline about others while eating his way into diabetes. It's the same sort of hypocrisy and it is only hypocrisy because there is no room for graciousness or sympathy for those who are mastered by their appetites. A person who does what they don't really want to do is just someone caught in the vise of what Paul describes in Romans 7, and that's just basically almost anyone. Dying alone but for someone who is only there to care for you because you pay them to might have been success to Rand but it is not heroism in the end, was it?
Even a cursory examination of her life reveals that she was in essential respects a sociopath and her assessment of the human condition marred by a form of class resentment she never overcome. As more than a few people noted Rand was profoundly immoral and, as some have noted, a hypocrite. Her capacity for unfettered dualism and rancor has been surpassed, I suppose, but she is emblematic of a person whose ideas are as bad as the intellectual disease she proposed to cure.
What I have found sad about the admirers of Rand I have known in my relatively short life is how their lives are at odds with their admiration of her work and the values they claim to adhere to. I have seen people who have homes because of the generosity of other people, who have places to stay and in some cases jobs because of the gestures of family and friends. Christians embracing Rand's philosophy is an exercise in peculiarity since Rand's philosophy does not seem to have any use for children and would appear to condone abortion of convenience. If, as some of my Rand-swilling associates contend, integrity and dignity are not inherent and must be earned then there is no basis for allowing a fetus to survive into adulthood if there are "rational" goals for which it is better to sacrifice the unborn. Indeed, the very nature of parenting itself suggests that Rand completely misunderstood the strange and mysterious nexus of selfishness and selflessness.
Most Rand fans I have met are, frankly, the kinds of "looters" who live off the generosity of others and are not particularly productive people that Rand would have despised. They are useless as artists, as writers, and work at relatively menial tasks that can easily be done by others, yet they seem to aspire to being greater than that even though it is not in them. They find comfort in looking down on people who are actually better than them while thinking the roles are reversed.
I don't say this as though I were someone great but because I have observed these people for enough years to see that their convictions of being better than the average herdm, or even merely their belief that they ASPIRE to be better than the common herd, are so manifestly refuted by their wretchedness in actual living that if I were an actual Randian I would be obliged to tell them they are losers whose self-delusion about even their mere competence dooms them to lives of useless parasitism rather than productive work. I am, however, a Christian who thinks that even if this assessment about those people is true I'd rather let them discover their smallness through their attempts at propounding their greatness. I don't need to tell them they are nobodies, the power of the market and their more or less insignificant place within it will eventually tell them that! They will be destroyed by their own folly. We all are eventually. Rand certainly was.
As a review in the National Review put it so long ago, even where one can agree with Rand's assessment of problems, her solution is tantamount to proposing that the way to ensure the failures of doctors are dealt with is by renouncing the Hippocratic oath. Liberals have been claiming for years that the current economic meltdown we are facing is because Rand fans were allowed to have their day during the administration of Bush 2. I am not sure that is all there is to be said on the subject.
HT to Practical Theology for Women: the end of proverbs focuses the beginning
http://theologyforwomen.blogspot.com/2009/11/heart-of-her-husband-safely-trusts-in.html
Proverbs 1:6
For understanding proverbs and parables, the words of the wise and their riddles.
Most of my life I have been presented with the book of Proverbs as practical wisdom for daily life. Proverbs has been like one of the books of the Law after the Mosaic Law. A long closing section like Proverbs 31 presents us, we have often been told, with the good wife, the ideal wife. At the risk of overstating things in terms of what I have heard men say, the Proverbs 31 woman is the ideal to shoot for but not an actual woman. Interestingly, the Proverbs 7 woman is considered all too real. One person who said Proverbs 31's woman is an ideal to shoot for who doesn't exist also said, "All women are whores, spiritually speaking." Uh ... problem.
The best way I can articulate the problem, as I perceive it, is that the broader literary context of the discourse on the excellent wife is the advice a mother gives to her son who is going to become a king. She has implored him earlier to not give his strength to women, to those who destroy kings. Obviously a contrast between two women throughout, wisdom and folly, has been a kind of meta-theme in each of the sections of Proverbs. We are introduced to wisdom personified in the first eight chapters and at the end, if you will, we are reintroduced to her through the good wife who Lemuel's mother would consider fit for a king.
Now I'm aware that certain Christians and pastors dislike the idea of seeing allegories in the Old Testament where there is no concrete evidence, but I also see that Christ Himself said that the scriptures point to Him to those who refused to accept him. For as often as I have heard people talk about how husbands are like Jesus and the wife is like the Church I have not stumbled across a whole lot of reflection on how the Proverbs 31 woman, typologically, can indicate what we should be able to say about the Church, since she shall be the bride of the King of Kings. Ihe Law of Moses was binding not only on the nation of Israel but on the individuals thereof, and in a similar way Proverbs can be received not just as axioms regarding the lives of individuals but outlines the causes and considerations of God's people.
But I want to direct attention to Proverbs 1:6 because it reveals that the book is useful not simply for making the simple wise and making the wise wiser but reveals that it will be a helpful aid in understanding proverbs and parables (epigrams), the words of the wise ... and their riddles.
For the years I have had Proverbs presented to me as a rulebook for practical wisdom I often benefited from it but there is another level at which it works, a level of riddles. Consider the Preacher in Ecclesiastes who, in addition to being wise, arranged and compiled many sayings. A way of observing Koholeth's methodology in Ecclesiastes is to see how he weighs one proverb against another and finds the limits of each, and even finds the proverbs wanting. Why, then, have I been so very wise? Does not the wise man die like the fool? Do not both meet the same fate? Do not be overly righteous and do not be overly wise, why die before your time? Do not be wicked and do not be a fool. Why should God strike you down? It is good to hold on to one and not let go of the other for the godly man avoids all extremes.
You see? The Preacher grasped that an unyielding application of proverbs as rules to live by is foolish because the proverbs are not necessarily rules about how to ensure a great life but riddles through which we can understand ourselves and understand that life is mysterious. When you read Proverbs consider the comparisons and contrasts between three types of people, the wise person, the fool, and the person who considers himself wise.
Of the three the person who thinks he is wise is worst off and is the most foolish and, ultimately, doomed. Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him! At the end of Proverbs , for instance, we get Agur, who says he is a fool and does not know the Lord. When Agur asks "Who has ascended and come down?"; when he asks, "Who has wrapped the waters in his garment; and finally asks "What is his son's name?" we are reading the words of a man who says he does not know the Lord. Yet immediately he proceeds to say every word of the Lord is pure.
Now it is helpful to consider that in ancient times it was commonly accepted that kings have divine or divinely sanctioned births. The messiah meant "annointed one" and it was not unheard of to consider the king a son of god. As Christ put it, if those who received the word of God were called gods ... . Before long Agur has presented us with a litany of riddles, of things too marvelous for him to understand, of things that are small but wise, of things under which the weight of things as they become shaken. The end of Proverbs leads us back to the beginning, and we are at the end invited to consider riddles.
I have noticed that among pastors and teachers I have heard in my life people spend plenty of time on the chapters up through the later twenties and, of course, that Proverbs 31 woman ... but no one teaches so much on Proverbs 30. I once observed that Agur said there were three things too mysterious for him, four too wonderful to understand--an eagle in flight, a snake moving along a rock, a ship on the sea, and a how a man has his way with a woman. When I used to observe, with great irritation, the condescension of married people or dating people talking about how "it's all much simpler than you people are making it out to be" I mentioned this proverb. One person said I could be taking that passage out of context. Ha ha, at 0 degrees Celsius.
See, for as long as I have heard Proverbs and read Proverbs as a rule book it seems absurd, impossible. Yes, fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and there is a great deal of practical wisdom to be gained from the proverbs. Yet more and more I am struck by the riddle aspect of the wisdom literature, especially when you take it as a whole and not as atomized parts. Don't just read Proverbs, read Proverbs with Ecclesiastes and with Job and with Song of Songs. You will begin to see that as a literary whole the Writings reveal the riddles of the human condition.
Why DOES the fool have money in his hand to buy wisdom when he doesn't really want it? Why DOES the fool care only to vent his own opinion rather than consider the counsel of others? Why does the fool isolate himself to pursue his own desires and rage against all sound wisdom? Why do people forsake their friends and the friends of their fathers to go get help in some faraway land? If the glory of old men is grandchildren why do some grandparents consider their grandchildren to be unruly brutes? If the glory of a child is his father why do so many men in evangelicalism lament the lack of fathers in our time and consider their fathers to be a dubious glory at best?
Proverbs that on their face look like simple declarative statements have within them the element of the riddle. If God does not let the righteous go hungry but denies the wicked what they crave what does this mean, especially in light of Ecclesiastes' lament that the wickeed often prosper, or the lament of the psalmists about the prosperity of the wicked?
Read each proverb as a riddle and not a rule and you will begin to understand how much wisdom there is in them. The answer to the riddle may not be an answer that vindicates you or your friends or your parents or anyone you love but if you read it with regard for the Lord it will be an answer that helps you understand Him and yourself better. By the time you get to Agur at the end of the book and have read "Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him?" you will see that for Agur to say he is a fool who has not attained wisdom and does not know the way of the Lord has an irony to it, because he desires to neither be so rich as to forget the Lord nor so poor as to become a criminal who defames the holy name. Just as there are fools who appear to be wise for as long as they keep their mouths shut there are wise people who appear to be fools because they do not trust in their own wisdom.
I spent years reading Proverbs as a rule book, a supplemental law to other moral teaching in the scriptures. I was advised to read it in this way and I regret that for so long I accepted that advice at face value. I regret that most teaching I heard about the proverbs treated it in that way and did not see the book as truly being full of riddles that God providentially gave us to meditate on to consider the riddles that are within ourselves. If the heart is deceitful above all things and beyond our own understanding then what role do riddles play? Can they not be used by the Lord as clarifying agents to reveal the answer to the riddles in my own heart?
Proverbs 1:6
For understanding proverbs and parables, the words of the wise and their riddles.
Most of my life I have been presented with the book of Proverbs as practical wisdom for daily life. Proverbs has been like one of the books of the Law after the Mosaic Law. A long closing section like Proverbs 31 presents us, we have often been told, with the good wife, the ideal wife. At the risk of overstating things in terms of what I have heard men say, the Proverbs 31 woman is the ideal to shoot for but not an actual woman. Interestingly, the Proverbs 7 woman is considered all too real. One person who said Proverbs 31's woman is an ideal to shoot for who doesn't exist also said, "All women are whores, spiritually speaking." Uh ... problem.
The best way I can articulate the problem, as I perceive it, is that the broader literary context of the discourse on the excellent wife is the advice a mother gives to her son who is going to become a king. She has implored him earlier to not give his strength to women, to those who destroy kings. Obviously a contrast between two women throughout, wisdom and folly, has been a kind of meta-theme in each of the sections of Proverbs. We are introduced to wisdom personified in the first eight chapters and at the end, if you will, we are reintroduced to her through the good wife who Lemuel's mother would consider fit for a king.
Now I'm aware that certain Christians and pastors dislike the idea of seeing allegories in the Old Testament where there is no concrete evidence, but I also see that Christ Himself said that the scriptures point to Him to those who refused to accept him. For as often as I have heard people talk about how husbands are like Jesus and the wife is like the Church I have not stumbled across a whole lot of reflection on how the Proverbs 31 woman, typologically, can indicate what we should be able to say about the Church, since she shall be the bride of the King of Kings. Ihe Law of Moses was binding not only on the nation of Israel but on the individuals thereof, and in a similar way Proverbs can be received not just as axioms regarding the lives of individuals but outlines the causes and considerations of God's people.
But I want to direct attention to Proverbs 1:6 because it reveals that the book is useful not simply for making the simple wise and making the wise wiser but reveals that it will be a helpful aid in understanding proverbs and parables (epigrams), the words of the wise ... and their riddles.
For the years I have had Proverbs presented to me as a rulebook for practical wisdom I often benefited from it but there is another level at which it works, a level of riddles. Consider the Preacher in Ecclesiastes who, in addition to being wise, arranged and compiled many sayings. A way of observing Koholeth's methodology in Ecclesiastes is to see how he weighs one proverb against another and finds the limits of each, and even finds the proverbs wanting. Why, then, have I been so very wise? Does not the wise man die like the fool? Do not both meet the same fate? Do not be overly righteous and do not be overly wise, why die before your time? Do not be wicked and do not be a fool. Why should God strike you down? It is good to hold on to one and not let go of the other for the godly man avoids all extremes.
You see? The Preacher grasped that an unyielding application of proverbs as rules to live by is foolish because the proverbs are not necessarily rules about how to ensure a great life but riddles through which we can understand ourselves and understand that life is mysterious. When you read Proverbs consider the comparisons and contrasts between three types of people, the wise person, the fool, and the person who considers himself wise.
Of the three the person who thinks he is wise is worst off and is the most foolish and, ultimately, doomed. Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him! At the end of Proverbs , for instance, we get Agur, who says he is a fool and does not know the Lord. When Agur asks "Who has ascended and come down?"; when he asks, "Who has wrapped the waters in his garment; and finally asks "What is his son's name?" we are reading the words of a man who says he does not know the Lord. Yet immediately he proceeds to say every word of the Lord is pure.
Now it is helpful to consider that in ancient times it was commonly accepted that kings have divine or divinely sanctioned births. The messiah meant "annointed one" and it was not unheard of to consider the king a son of god. As Christ put it, if those who received the word of God were called gods ... . Before long Agur has presented us with a litany of riddles, of things too marvelous for him to understand, of things that are small but wise, of things under which the weight of things as they become shaken. The end of Proverbs leads us back to the beginning, and we are at the end invited to consider riddles.
I have noticed that among pastors and teachers I have heard in my life people spend plenty of time on the chapters up through the later twenties and, of course, that Proverbs 31 woman ... but no one teaches so much on Proverbs 30. I once observed that Agur said there were three things too mysterious for him, four too wonderful to understand--an eagle in flight, a snake moving along a rock, a ship on the sea, and a how a man has his way with a woman. When I used to observe, with great irritation, the condescension of married people or dating people talking about how "it's all much simpler than you people are making it out to be" I mentioned this proverb. One person said I could be taking that passage out of context. Ha ha, at 0 degrees Celsius.
See, for as long as I have heard Proverbs and read Proverbs as a rule book it seems absurd, impossible. Yes, fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and there is a great deal of practical wisdom to be gained from the proverbs. Yet more and more I am struck by the riddle aspect of the wisdom literature, especially when you take it as a whole and not as atomized parts. Don't just read Proverbs, read Proverbs with Ecclesiastes and with Job and with Song of Songs. You will begin to see that as a literary whole the Writings reveal the riddles of the human condition.
Why DOES the fool have money in his hand to buy wisdom when he doesn't really want it? Why DOES the fool care only to vent his own opinion rather than consider the counsel of others? Why does the fool isolate himself to pursue his own desires and rage against all sound wisdom? Why do people forsake their friends and the friends of their fathers to go get help in some faraway land? If the glory of old men is grandchildren why do some grandparents consider their grandchildren to be unruly brutes? If the glory of a child is his father why do so many men in evangelicalism lament the lack of fathers in our time and consider their fathers to be a dubious glory at best?
Proverbs that on their face look like simple declarative statements have within them the element of the riddle. If God does not let the righteous go hungry but denies the wicked what they crave what does this mean, especially in light of Ecclesiastes' lament that the wickeed often prosper, or the lament of the psalmists about the prosperity of the wicked?
Read each proverb as a riddle and not a rule and you will begin to understand how much wisdom there is in them. The answer to the riddle may not be an answer that vindicates you or your friends or your parents or anyone you love but if you read it with regard for the Lord it will be an answer that helps you understand Him and yourself better. By the time you get to Agur at the end of the book and have read "Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him?" you will see that for Agur to say he is a fool who has not attained wisdom and does not know the way of the Lord has an irony to it, because he desires to neither be so rich as to forget the Lord nor so poor as to become a criminal who defames the holy name. Just as there are fools who appear to be wise for as long as they keep their mouths shut there are wise people who appear to be fools because they do not trust in their own wisdom.
I spent years reading Proverbs as a rule book, a supplemental law to other moral teaching in the scriptures. I was advised to read it in this way and I regret that for so long I accepted that advice at face value. I regret that most teaching I heard about the proverbs treated it in that way and did not see the book as truly being full of riddles that God providentially gave us to meditate on to consider the riddles that are within ourselves. If the heart is deceitful above all things and beyond our own understanding then what role do riddles play? Can they not be used by the Lord as clarifying agents to reveal the answer to the riddles in my own heart?
Monday, November 02, 2009
Preludes and Fugues for solo guitar, taking stock of a project nearly one third of the way to completion
I have been researching things musical while on the job hunt and I have discovered that Igor Rekhin composed a set of 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar between about 1990-1995. So I realize that I am not the first composer to think of writing an entire set of preludes and fugues in every major and minor key. I am not the least bit surprised that the first composer to complete and publish such a set of works is a Russian composer!
I am merely a dilletante and not an expert at guitar literature from Russia or eastern Europe but my experience has been that Russian composers for the guitar retain what I can only call a certain sort of seriousness about the scope of the repertoire, not that that will make any sense or even seem rational. In the golden age of classical guitar repertoire in the West we had a number of composers composing large scale works in contemporary styles (i.e. like Haydn, like Mozart, like Schubert, et al).
Yet by and large contrapuntal works were not being written and don't tend to be written for the guitar, while the pinnacles of the repertoire in keyboard and string literature invariably include fugues. We see fugues in the string quartet repertoire, solo violin repertoire, piano repertoire, symphonic repertoire, and at the risk of overstating a case it would appear that the capacity for polyphonic composition is often a touchstone in establishing the seriousness, academic and otherwise, of much literature. It signals a point of arrival in your ability to conceive of music melodically, harmonically, structurally, and emotionally. One could be forgiven for thinking that the difference between classical guitar and the more popular forms of art music might be the distinction between polyphonic works and homophonic works. A certain levity and liveliness of material may also prejudice non-guitarist music critics in the world of art music from taking guitar repertoire seriously but that is another topic for another time.
A set of preludes and fugues for two guitars was composed by Castelnuovo-Tedesco and I have Delcamper avoz to thank, a great deal, for introducing me to those works. A set of preludes and fugues for solo guitar represents an even more difficult step in the repertoire and it is not too surprising Rekhin's achievent came some thirty years after Tedesco's. I have not, alas, had an opportunity to study Rekhin's work in much detail but I would be pleased to study Tedesco's fugues and compare them to Rekhin's fugues.
Any cursory research into what I do will reveal that I have been composing preludes and fugues for solo guitar since 2007. I have gotten to a point where nearly eight of twenty-four have been completed. When I read that Rekhin has already composed such a set I was encouraged. If a composer can compose and publish a set of such works then this establishes a precedent for my work. What surely amount to essentially little known or unknown works in the West means that while my set, when I finish it, may be unusual, it will not be without precedent.
What is more, having composed nearly a third of the works already it will certainly not be possible for me to somehow emulate Rekhin's style since I have not actually heard any of the works beyond cryptic mp3 samples at the composer's websit.
What I believe can be confidently said about the non-guitar literature and its "serious" element is that a measure of seriousness and artistic weight literally accrues to size. It shouldn't be the case, you may say to yourself, in a fairer and better world, but size basically matters. It takes a greater level of mastery to compose a Mass in B minor, a Passion According to St. Matthew, a Goldberg Variations, an Art of Fugue, or a Musical Offering than it does to compose even a Jupiter Symphony (hey, I do like that one even though I'm not a Mozart fan). It does take a level of mastery to compose a Ninth Symphony, an Op. 111, a B flat quartet with the Grand Fugue in it, and so on. Even in rock music the concept album can often indicate a higher level of musical mastery over emotional content and structure than bagning out 2.5 minute punk screeds.
To be fair this is not the same as saying that different works built around different aesthetic criteria or philosophies of aesthetics don't happen or should be measured by one measure. I'm just pointing out that there are different kinds of mastery in composing a novel, a sonnet, a comic book, a terza rima, or an essay. Guitarist composers and composers who have written for the guitar tend not to write novels and yet it is often, if you will, the critics who absorb novels who shape the tastes of music. Even in rock music this can pervade where the "novel" of the accumulated short stories of an artist like Bob Dylan or Aimee Mann or The Beatles take precedence over, say, The Doors, or The Monkees.
What I have been thinking about for a long time is that guitarist composers tend not to think things through at a cyclical level. Each movement is usually a self-contained entity in a larger work. You see less of this in the masters of the golden age like Giuliani or Sor, for instance, but it is to some degree still true even there. In fact it was arguably non-guitarist composers like Rodrigo, Britten, and others who throughout the twentieth century gave us a sense of what was possible in cyclical works for the guitar. Britten, of course, was particularly a genius about this, as was Takemitsu. I confess to having no real love for Henze and I hate Ginastera's Sonata. I will throw a bone and say that IF someone can play a persuasive account of Ginastera's Sonata I'll give it a shot because I enjoyed his dances for piano ... but I have not had a chance to hear that champion yet.
Koshkin has taken steps toward cross movement cyclical unification that I consider promising but I admit to being a purist or a snob here and note that Charles Rosen pointed out that the contrast within an exposition is less a contrast of thematic characters than of tonal centers. A certain tonal polarity needs to be emphasized between the tonic and dominant so that the resolution in the recapitulation is effective and Koshkin, though I believe he is a brilliant composer, has often taken such a fast and loose approach to sonata form that his dramatic gestures are sometimes robbed of some of the power they might have through a more assured and steady contrast in harmonic anchor points in the exposition.
Alas he has focal dystonia now so we'll never get to know precisely how his composing might tighten up if he integrated his wonderful approach to thmes into a more classically "classical" sonata allegro form. Be that as it may, his Sonata for flute and guitar is a marvelous example of the kind of cross-movement cyclical development of gestures that I submit we see often enough in non-guitar literature but not that often in guitar literature.
For my part, what I hope I can tackle is to compose a set of preludes and fugues for solo guitar that I can compose alongside my sonata cycle of duos pairing the guitar off with each instrument of the orchestra, give or take some less common members of the instrument families. I am not afraid to say that I believe that at some point some guitarist composer should be willing to make a commitment to such a series of cycles. Preludes and fugues for solo guitar obviously look back to the titanic accomplishments of J. S. Bach, while a giant cycle of duo sonatas looks back to the works of Beethoven (and someone else but you either know who that someone else is instantly or you won't figure out who it is).
I don't think that we as guitarists should fret so much about being taken seriously as artists or as composers. If anything I believe that classical guitarists have been so busy hoping to be taken seriously on the world stage no one is paying attention to the ways in which the guitar got more attention when the guitarists paid more attention to everyone else's repertoire. Segovia played transcriptions of Bach and Albeniz, you know, keyboard composers. Instead of the guitarist constantly looking inward at the admittedly beautiful repertoire we have, why not look outward to the string quartet, to the piano literature, to the wealth of choral literature, to music for woodwinds, to the symphonic repertoire, to percussion repertoire?
Now composing a set of preludes and fugues in itself will accomplish nothing for the guitar as a "serious" instrument. The vast majority of guitarists will simply never touch such repertoire. I notice that no Western guitarists seem to have touched Rekhin's work, though a couple of Russian guitarists seem to have ventured to play a few of Rekhin's works on disc. Unfortunately no one has seen to it to play all 24 preludes and fugues, which is too bad. I am not sure I have enough chops to play such works myself or that if I dared to play the cycle that anyone would care in the slightest here in Seattle. On the other hand, I don't know if anyone will much care if I compose a set of preludes and fugues for solo guitar of my own here in Seattle.
But I believe that the challenge of such a cycle is worth the effort. I believe it is worthwhile for a guitarist-composer to tackle such a gigantic challenge because that is what makes life fun. Until I knew of Rekhin's set I supposed that the only reason we did not have word about a set of preludes and fugues was not because such a cycle had not already been written but because it had not been published or published widely enough to get better recognition.
So if I am going to compose a cycle of preludes and fugues for solo guitar what I would LIKE to be able to do is to compose them in such a way that they have an immediate emotional appeal and accessibility. I want to compose, if possible, as much like Bach as possible but to do so with the emotional immediacy and friendliness of Haydn (who also, it must be said, wrote fugues).
Notice I appended Haydn and not Mozart or Beethoven to Bach! As the members of the Emersons put it about Haydn, you never get the sense that he brings his ego into things, that he is showing off to prove how great he is the way you do with Beethoven and even Mozart. His music reveals that he is a man of the people. He has the academic style but the academic style is to better serve you with somethign warm and entertaining.
So many breakthroughs and revolutions have happened in non-guitar repertoire that there are certain projects that have not been undertaken for the sake of comprehensiveness that I think should be undertaken. If, as the axiom has it, the guitar is a miniature orchestra, there is no excuse for guitarists to not be intimately acquainted with the repertoire of the instruments in the orchestra.
The metaphor of the guitar as orchestra has been over-played and has wanted badly for meaningful application. Don't just talk about the guitar being this little orchestra, remember that in the orchestra the strings do a lot of grunt work to support sections that have solos and that huge stretches of music go by where you, in the orhcestra pit, are simply a small part of the music.
Most guitarists would not consent to play this sort of "orchestral" music I have just described. Sure, Yamashita was happy to play the Op. 19 trio by Giuliani, which is an adorable piece and I'm glad he recorded it, but many guitarists would balk at the prospect of goign to so much effort to just be in the background behind the violin and cello. For my part I have not had the fortune to find musicians who want to play that sort of chamber music with me and too often I find what "chamber music" means in the world of classical guitarists is, "Oh, we have TWO guitars ... maybe even MORE." If the guitar in itself is a miniature orchestra what is gained by getting more miniature orchestras? Have that miniature orchestra back up a bona fide soloist already! Find a cellist, find a flutist, find a violist, find a trombone-player. If the guitar is that miniature orchestra there need to be more concertos in which the guitar is the orchestra having a playful, witty conversation with the soloist, working together toward a common end and the pleasure of others.
What is more, if the guitar is really a miniature orchestra then why shouldn't there be an Art of Fugue or Well-Tempered Clavier equivalent for solo guitar? If the guitar is REALLY not limited by this or that as so many idealistic guitarists (who are almost invariably PERFORMERS and not composers) love to say, then let's see people step up and start playing contrapuntal works more consistently, and not just the transcriptions of Bach sonatas and partitas. Seriously, I can pay to hear Hilary Hahn play Bach more brilliantly than the even better-than-average guitarist is probably going to play Bach transcribed from violin to guitar ... and Hahn is (no offense) going to be smarter about it and look better doing it.
But for my part if the axiom among some teachers is that you study Bach and listen to Bach but don't PLAY Bach if you're a guitarist then the solution is to simply write a set of contrapuntal works that AREN'T Bach but that are informed by his works. After all, no one said it couldn't be done and if they did Rekhin has apparently proven that this "couldn't be done" did get done.
Now I may eventually get to study Rekhin's works and I might find I don't like them. A fugue is only as good as its tune, after all, and perhaps Rekhin is the sort of composer who has that kind of contrapuntal control that lacks a winsome, emotional expression. I don't know, I haven't been able to study his work yet, but anyone with the drive and ambition to compose 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar is going to get the benefit of the doubt from me. Besides, if his cycle proves it can be done then to me it is yet more proof that my own project for solo guitar is not absurd.
So as you can see, I have a few years of life ahead of me (I'm in the middle of the 30s) and I have two big old cyclical works to keep me busy, the oft-mentioned preludes and fugues for solo guitar, and the oft-mentioned sonata cycle of duos pairing the guitar up with all sorts of other instruments. I have in the last nine years gotten six of the duo sonatas finished and in the last two years have finished seven of the 24 pairs for solo guitar. God willing and with a lot more work I hope to finish both cycles and I hope that the classical guitar world will hear some of these pieces and that, if things go really well, a lot of people actually like what I write.
I am merely a dilletante and not an expert at guitar literature from Russia or eastern Europe but my experience has been that Russian composers for the guitar retain what I can only call a certain sort of seriousness about the scope of the repertoire, not that that will make any sense or even seem rational. In the golden age of classical guitar repertoire in the West we had a number of composers composing large scale works in contemporary styles (i.e. like Haydn, like Mozart, like Schubert, et al).
Yet by and large contrapuntal works were not being written and don't tend to be written for the guitar, while the pinnacles of the repertoire in keyboard and string literature invariably include fugues. We see fugues in the string quartet repertoire, solo violin repertoire, piano repertoire, symphonic repertoire, and at the risk of overstating a case it would appear that the capacity for polyphonic composition is often a touchstone in establishing the seriousness, academic and otherwise, of much literature. It signals a point of arrival in your ability to conceive of music melodically, harmonically, structurally, and emotionally. One could be forgiven for thinking that the difference between classical guitar and the more popular forms of art music might be the distinction between polyphonic works and homophonic works. A certain levity and liveliness of material may also prejudice non-guitarist music critics in the world of art music from taking guitar repertoire seriously but that is another topic for another time.
A set of preludes and fugues for two guitars was composed by Castelnuovo-Tedesco and I have Delcamper avoz to thank, a great deal, for introducing me to those works. A set of preludes and fugues for solo guitar represents an even more difficult step in the repertoire and it is not too surprising Rekhin's achievent came some thirty years after Tedesco's. I have not, alas, had an opportunity to study Rekhin's work in much detail but I would be pleased to study Tedesco's fugues and compare them to Rekhin's fugues.
Any cursory research into what I do will reveal that I have been composing preludes and fugues for solo guitar since 2007. I have gotten to a point where nearly eight of twenty-four have been completed. When I read that Rekhin has already composed such a set I was encouraged. If a composer can compose and publish a set of such works then this establishes a precedent for my work. What surely amount to essentially little known or unknown works in the West means that while my set, when I finish it, may be unusual, it will not be without precedent.
What is more, having composed nearly a third of the works already it will certainly not be possible for me to somehow emulate Rekhin's style since I have not actually heard any of the works beyond cryptic mp3 samples at the composer's websit.
What I believe can be confidently said about the non-guitar literature and its "serious" element is that a measure of seriousness and artistic weight literally accrues to size. It shouldn't be the case, you may say to yourself, in a fairer and better world, but size basically matters. It takes a greater level of mastery to compose a Mass in B minor, a Passion According to St. Matthew, a Goldberg Variations, an Art of Fugue, or a Musical Offering than it does to compose even a Jupiter Symphony (hey, I do like that one even though I'm not a Mozart fan). It does take a level of mastery to compose a Ninth Symphony, an Op. 111, a B flat quartet with the Grand Fugue in it, and so on. Even in rock music the concept album can often indicate a higher level of musical mastery over emotional content and structure than bagning out 2.5 minute punk screeds.
To be fair this is not the same as saying that different works built around different aesthetic criteria or philosophies of aesthetics don't happen or should be measured by one measure. I'm just pointing out that there are different kinds of mastery in composing a novel, a sonnet, a comic book, a terza rima, or an essay. Guitarist composers and composers who have written for the guitar tend not to write novels and yet it is often, if you will, the critics who absorb novels who shape the tastes of music. Even in rock music this can pervade where the "novel" of the accumulated short stories of an artist like Bob Dylan or Aimee Mann or The Beatles take precedence over, say, The Doors, or The Monkees.
What I have been thinking about for a long time is that guitarist composers tend not to think things through at a cyclical level. Each movement is usually a self-contained entity in a larger work. You see less of this in the masters of the golden age like Giuliani or Sor, for instance, but it is to some degree still true even there. In fact it was arguably non-guitarist composers like Rodrigo, Britten, and others who throughout the twentieth century gave us a sense of what was possible in cyclical works for the guitar. Britten, of course, was particularly a genius about this, as was Takemitsu. I confess to having no real love for Henze and I hate Ginastera's Sonata. I will throw a bone and say that IF someone can play a persuasive account of Ginastera's Sonata I'll give it a shot because I enjoyed his dances for piano ... but I have not had a chance to hear that champion yet.
Koshkin has taken steps toward cross movement cyclical unification that I consider promising but I admit to being a purist or a snob here and note that Charles Rosen pointed out that the contrast within an exposition is less a contrast of thematic characters than of tonal centers. A certain tonal polarity needs to be emphasized between the tonic and dominant so that the resolution in the recapitulation is effective and Koshkin, though I believe he is a brilliant composer, has often taken such a fast and loose approach to sonata form that his dramatic gestures are sometimes robbed of some of the power they might have through a more assured and steady contrast in harmonic anchor points in the exposition.
Alas he has focal dystonia now so we'll never get to know precisely how his composing might tighten up if he integrated his wonderful approach to thmes into a more classically "classical" sonata allegro form. Be that as it may, his Sonata for flute and guitar is a marvelous example of the kind of cross-movement cyclical development of gestures that I submit we see often enough in non-guitar literature but not that often in guitar literature.
For my part, what I hope I can tackle is to compose a set of preludes and fugues for solo guitar that I can compose alongside my sonata cycle of duos pairing the guitar off with each instrument of the orchestra, give or take some less common members of the instrument families. I am not afraid to say that I believe that at some point some guitarist composer should be willing to make a commitment to such a series of cycles. Preludes and fugues for solo guitar obviously look back to the titanic accomplishments of J. S. Bach, while a giant cycle of duo sonatas looks back to the works of Beethoven (and someone else but you either know who that someone else is instantly or you won't figure out who it is).
I don't think that we as guitarists should fret so much about being taken seriously as artists or as composers. If anything I believe that classical guitarists have been so busy hoping to be taken seriously on the world stage no one is paying attention to the ways in which the guitar got more attention when the guitarists paid more attention to everyone else's repertoire. Segovia played transcriptions of Bach and Albeniz, you know, keyboard composers. Instead of the guitarist constantly looking inward at the admittedly beautiful repertoire we have, why not look outward to the string quartet, to the piano literature, to the wealth of choral literature, to music for woodwinds, to the symphonic repertoire, to percussion repertoire?
Now composing a set of preludes and fugues in itself will accomplish nothing for the guitar as a "serious" instrument. The vast majority of guitarists will simply never touch such repertoire. I notice that no Western guitarists seem to have touched Rekhin's work, though a couple of Russian guitarists seem to have ventured to play a few of Rekhin's works on disc. Unfortunately no one has seen to it to play all 24 preludes and fugues, which is too bad. I am not sure I have enough chops to play such works myself or that if I dared to play the cycle that anyone would care in the slightest here in Seattle. On the other hand, I don't know if anyone will much care if I compose a set of preludes and fugues for solo guitar of my own here in Seattle.
But I believe that the challenge of such a cycle is worth the effort. I believe it is worthwhile for a guitarist-composer to tackle such a gigantic challenge because that is what makes life fun. Until I knew of Rekhin's set I supposed that the only reason we did not have word about a set of preludes and fugues was not because such a cycle had not already been written but because it had not been published or published widely enough to get better recognition.
So if I am going to compose a cycle of preludes and fugues for solo guitar what I would LIKE to be able to do is to compose them in such a way that they have an immediate emotional appeal and accessibility. I want to compose, if possible, as much like Bach as possible but to do so with the emotional immediacy and friendliness of Haydn (who also, it must be said, wrote fugues).
Notice I appended Haydn and not Mozart or Beethoven to Bach! As the members of the Emersons put it about Haydn, you never get the sense that he brings his ego into things, that he is showing off to prove how great he is the way you do with Beethoven and even Mozart. His music reveals that he is a man of the people. He has the academic style but the academic style is to better serve you with somethign warm and entertaining.
So many breakthroughs and revolutions have happened in non-guitar repertoire that there are certain projects that have not been undertaken for the sake of comprehensiveness that I think should be undertaken. If, as the axiom has it, the guitar is a miniature orchestra, there is no excuse for guitarists to not be intimately acquainted with the repertoire of the instruments in the orchestra.
The metaphor of the guitar as orchestra has been over-played and has wanted badly for meaningful application. Don't just talk about the guitar being this little orchestra, remember that in the orchestra the strings do a lot of grunt work to support sections that have solos and that huge stretches of music go by where you, in the orhcestra pit, are simply a small part of the music.
Most guitarists would not consent to play this sort of "orchestral" music I have just described. Sure, Yamashita was happy to play the Op. 19 trio by Giuliani, which is an adorable piece and I'm glad he recorded it, but many guitarists would balk at the prospect of goign to so much effort to just be in the background behind the violin and cello. For my part I have not had the fortune to find musicians who want to play that sort of chamber music with me and too often I find what "chamber music" means in the world of classical guitarists is, "Oh, we have TWO guitars ... maybe even MORE." If the guitar in itself is a miniature orchestra what is gained by getting more miniature orchestras? Have that miniature orchestra back up a bona fide soloist already! Find a cellist, find a flutist, find a violist, find a trombone-player. If the guitar is that miniature orchestra there need to be more concertos in which the guitar is the orchestra having a playful, witty conversation with the soloist, working together toward a common end and the pleasure of others.
What is more, if the guitar is really a miniature orchestra then why shouldn't there be an Art of Fugue or Well-Tempered Clavier equivalent for solo guitar? If the guitar is REALLY not limited by this or that as so many idealistic guitarists (who are almost invariably PERFORMERS and not composers) love to say, then let's see people step up and start playing contrapuntal works more consistently, and not just the transcriptions of Bach sonatas and partitas. Seriously, I can pay to hear Hilary Hahn play Bach more brilliantly than the even better-than-average guitarist is probably going to play Bach transcribed from violin to guitar ... and Hahn is (no offense) going to be smarter about it and look better doing it.
But for my part if the axiom among some teachers is that you study Bach and listen to Bach but don't PLAY Bach if you're a guitarist then the solution is to simply write a set of contrapuntal works that AREN'T Bach but that are informed by his works. After all, no one said it couldn't be done and if they did Rekhin has apparently proven that this "couldn't be done" did get done.
Now I may eventually get to study Rekhin's works and I might find I don't like them. A fugue is only as good as its tune, after all, and perhaps Rekhin is the sort of composer who has that kind of contrapuntal control that lacks a winsome, emotional expression. I don't know, I haven't been able to study his work yet, but anyone with the drive and ambition to compose 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar is going to get the benefit of the doubt from me. Besides, if his cycle proves it can be done then to me it is yet more proof that my own project for solo guitar is not absurd.
So as you can see, I have a few years of life ahead of me (I'm in the middle of the 30s) and I have two big old cyclical works to keep me busy, the oft-mentioned preludes and fugues for solo guitar, and the oft-mentioned sonata cycle of duos pairing the guitar up with all sorts of other instruments. I have in the last nine years gotten six of the duo sonatas finished and in the last two years have finished seven of the 24 pairs for solo guitar. God willing and with a lot more work I hope to finish both cycles and I hope that the classical guitar world will hear some of these pieces and that, if things go really well, a lot of people actually like what I write.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Mel Gibson says that Braveheart's William Wallace was pure fantasy ... and swings the pendulum too far the other way
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article6890067.ece
So now Gibson has said that William Wallace was a monster and that he fictionalized all sorts of things about him to make him the hero and easier to root for because someone has to be the good guy and someone has to be the bad guy because that's how stories are told.
Except that, well, no, that doesn't have to be true in the binary terms that Gibson set up in Braveheart. Historical fictions in drama can serve a purpose and it can serve a purpose to consider one person a villian and another person a hero yet to say that Hollywood story-telling requires a clear cut bad guy and good guy is overstating the case a bit much. There is still room for shades of gray, even greatly contrasting shades of gray. I'm going to make my polemic against Gibson extreme to point out what I'm talking about. The last ten years have seen more moral nuance in the character development of superheroes than you see in William Wallace. There's more plausibly psychological tension and ambiguity in Batman, Spiderman, Doctor Octopus, Harvey Dent, Harry Osbourn, or even Hellboy than in William Wallace. There was more pyschological nuance and depth of story-telling in Toy Story that year than in Braveheart.
But for Gibson to go the other way from his simplistic jingoism and say Wallace was a monster is also cheating. As C. S. Lewis used to put it, the mark of a great villain is someone who COULD have been a great hero but chose a different path than the hero's path. It is also a truism with cause that one person's hero is another person's villain. Gibson's simplification comes from what you might expect of a man who spent his life doing action movies where black and white must win out over shades of gray.
Gibson's cartoony depiction of Wallace and "history" is shown for being the cartoon that it is if you compare the moral universe of Braveheart to Toy Story. Yes, I'm going to hammer that one because I have rarely seen a canard more persistent than the idea that cartoons are for children or childish and lack the "adult" sensibility of "adult" story-telling. Most "adult" films are not as well-paced or written as films for children because the adult crutches of sex and violence, sexy violence, or violent sex are not at disposal, devices that Braveheart used lavishly within the realm of a mainstream theatrical release.
I could be more simply dismissive of Gibson's fantasy on William Wallace were it not for the fact that there was a William Wallace II.
So now Gibson has said that William Wallace was a monster and that he fictionalized all sorts of things about him to make him the hero and easier to root for because someone has to be the good guy and someone has to be the bad guy because that's how stories are told.
Except that, well, no, that doesn't have to be true in the binary terms that Gibson set up in Braveheart. Historical fictions in drama can serve a purpose and it can serve a purpose to consider one person a villian and another person a hero yet to say that Hollywood story-telling requires a clear cut bad guy and good guy is overstating the case a bit much. There is still room for shades of gray, even greatly contrasting shades of gray. I'm going to make my polemic against Gibson extreme to point out what I'm talking about. The last ten years have seen more moral nuance in the character development of superheroes than you see in William Wallace. There's more plausibly psychological tension and ambiguity in Batman, Spiderman, Doctor Octopus, Harvey Dent, Harry Osbourn, or even Hellboy than in William Wallace. There was more pyschological nuance and depth of story-telling in Toy Story that year than in Braveheart.
But for Gibson to go the other way from his simplistic jingoism and say Wallace was a monster is also cheating. As C. S. Lewis used to put it, the mark of a great villain is someone who COULD have been a great hero but chose a different path than the hero's path. It is also a truism with cause that one person's hero is another person's villain. Gibson's simplification comes from what you might expect of a man who spent his life doing action movies where black and white must win out over shades of gray.
Gibson's cartoony depiction of Wallace and "history" is shown for being the cartoon that it is if you compare the moral universe of Braveheart to Toy Story. Yes, I'm going to hammer that one because I have rarely seen a canard more persistent than the idea that cartoons are for children or childish and lack the "adult" sensibility of "adult" story-telling. Most "adult" films are not as well-paced or written as films for children because the adult crutches of sex and violence, sexy violence, or violent sex are not at disposal, devices that Braveheart used lavishly within the realm of a mainstream theatrical release.
I could be more simply dismissive of Gibson's fantasy on William Wallace were it not for the fact that there was a William Wallace II.
Thinking outside the box? Where is the box? What does it look like?
Sometimes I am good at it but many times I'm not. Thinking outside the box is what people have urged me to do in job hunting and I find the older I get the less sense it visibly makes to think outside the box. I'm not old but I'm not young enough to have the world, as it were, before me.
Being young means you can fool yourself into thinking you have more realistic options than you really have. As Joan Didion put it in a certain grimly polemical essay, the dream of going to New York City and becoming a sculptor or painter or famous poet is not a fantasy that figures prominently in the minds of consenting adults. It does, however, figure prominently in the minds of children. The dream of being a rock star, what post-pubescent kid hasn't dreamed of being a rock star of some kind in some field? I admit it was a propensity I had in my youth and as I am somewhat older I may have the problem of overcompensating for that youthful idealism.
I remember being in a band in college and while in college we entered into a talent show. My bandmates thought we did a good job. I thought we did all right but we were playing a cover and it just didn't seem like the kind of cover that would necessarily net a win. My friends in the band thought for sure we were going to win. One of them said that when we won we shouldn't make too much of a thing of it. Being that the setting was what it was I was more glad that we were playing in front of more people than we'd probably ever play the rest of our lives. The MC congratulated me on our band doing a good job and at the end of the day the band didn't win. A few friends told us later that we were robbed. But while it was disappointing to not "win" why should I have thought that winning proved something? I would rather we have won for some original material and not for a cover of someone else's song.
I admit that my whole life I have puzzled over the balance of realistic expectations and following dreams. Are dreams really worth building a life around when dreams can be unattainable through things you have no control over? I dreamed of being a fighter pilot (what American kid didn't at some point consider the possibility), I dreamed of being a pilot. That quickly was revealed to be physically impossible. When I wanted to learn to play the clarinet I was heartbroken to discover that there was just no financial possibility of doing that, it was one of the more memorable moments for me of a long-faded childhood.
It is easier to remember the miseries of discovering something I wanted wasn't possible than to remember the little victories and happier memories of childhood. The disasters loomed so large they dwarfed the happier times and, indeed, made it more painful to remember the good times in the end. I suppose to put it in hyperbolic, maudlin terms, it is a greater sorrow to remember the beauty of Jerusalem by the waters of Babylon than to see the ruins of Jerusalem itself.
For a lot of my life I have felt like I needed to fit inside the boxes other people told me I needed to fit into. Even people who said I shouldn't have to fit into someone else's boxes often seemed to be priming me for the simple bait and switch, that the box I needed to be in was not the box person X was telling me I needed to put myself into to be fully human but the box that he or she, person Y, was telling me would make me truly human.
The phrase thinking outside the box has become inert to me, irrelevant, beyond the point of wearisom. I feel like I have gone through my life not being sure what the box really was, let alone how one was supposed to somehow think outside whatever that box was that people wouldn't tell me about. You can think outside the box if you don't know what the box is and people won't tell you but much of my life I have felt like the problem is that people want me to think INSIDE THE BOX, specifically, their box, the box they feel they shouldn't have to spell out for me because, well, that would be wasting their time.
I'd like to figure out what the boxes are but I don't feel like I'm smart enough. I often wonder if I can even fit inside that box, whatever box people seem to be saying I need to fit into. If I get told I shouldn't think in terms of being in any box at all, well, that's just yet another box. Even people who have told me I need to take risks are still basically telling me what to do. It gets my stymied.
Being young means you can fool yourself into thinking you have more realistic options than you really have. As Joan Didion put it in a certain grimly polemical essay, the dream of going to New York City and becoming a sculptor or painter or famous poet is not a fantasy that figures prominently in the minds of consenting adults. It does, however, figure prominently in the minds of children. The dream of being a rock star, what post-pubescent kid hasn't dreamed of being a rock star of some kind in some field? I admit it was a propensity I had in my youth and as I am somewhat older I may have the problem of overcompensating for that youthful idealism.
I remember being in a band in college and while in college we entered into a talent show. My bandmates thought we did a good job. I thought we did all right but we were playing a cover and it just didn't seem like the kind of cover that would necessarily net a win. My friends in the band thought for sure we were going to win. One of them said that when we won we shouldn't make too much of a thing of it. Being that the setting was what it was I was more glad that we were playing in front of more people than we'd probably ever play the rest of our lives. The MC congratulated me on our band doing a good job and at the end of the day the band didn't win. A few friends told us later that we were robbed. But while it was disappointing to not "win" why should I have thought that winning proved something? I would rather we have won for some original material and not for a cover of someone else's song.
I admit that my whole life I have puzzled over the balance of realistic expectations and following dreams. Are dreams really worth building a life around when dreams can be unattainable through things you have no control over? I dreamed of being a fighter pilot (what American kid didn't at some point consider the possibility), I dreamed of being a pilot. That quickly was revealed to be physically impossible. When I wanted to learn to play the clarinet I was heartbroken to discover that there was just no financial possibility of doing that, it was one of the more memorable moments for me of a long-faded childhood.
It is easier to remember the miseries of discovering something I wanted wasn't possible than to remember the little victories and happier memories of childhood. The disasters loomed so large they dwarfed the happier times and, indeed, made it more painful to remember the good times in the end. I suppose to put it in hyperbolic, maudlin terms, it is a greater sorrow to remember the beauty of Jerusalem by the waters of Babylon than to see the ruins of Jerusalem itself.
For a lot of my life I have felt like I needed to fit inside the boxes other people told me I needed to fit into. Even people who said I shouldn't have to fit into someone else's boxes often seemed to be priming me for the simple bait and switch, that the box I needed to be in was not the box person X was telling me I needed to put myself into to be fully human but the box that he or she, person Y, was telling me would make me truly human.
The phrase thinking outside the box has become inert to me, irrelevant, beyond the point of wearisom. I feel like I have gone through my life not being sure what the box really was, let alone how one was supposed to somehow think outside whatever that box was that people wouldn't tell me about. You can think outside the box if you don't know what the box is and people won't tell you but much of my life I have felt like the problem is that people want me to think INSIDE THE BOX, specifically, their box, the box they feel they shouldn't have to spell out for me because, well, that would be wasting their time.
I'd like to figure out what the boxes are but I don't feel like I'm smart enough. I often wonder if I can even fit inside that box, whatever box people seem to be saying I need to fit into. If I get told I shouldn't think in terms of being in any box at all, well, that's just yet another box. Even people who have told me I need to take risks are still basically telling me what to do. It gets my stymied.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Link: Civatate Dei: The Social Gospel of Mars Hill --yes, Dan, they have one. :-)
http://civitatedei.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/the-social-gospel-of-mars-hill/
Dan over at Civatatedei wrote a tongue-in-cheek observation about the social gospel of Mars Hill. Having had a connection to Mars Hill that has lasted about a decade I would say that, yes, Dan is totally right. The Mars Hill vision Driscoll has repeatedly articulated that "young men would love Jesus, get jobs, take wives, and make babies" is totally a Social Gospel idea, a vision that through the preaching of the Gospel society will be transformed by Jesus into a better society. The fact that this is not a LEFT-leaning social gospel does not make it any less a social gospel.
When the vision is to see the city transformed by Jesus what do you envision in that changed city? THAT, my friends, is still Social Gospel even if it is not the old-school "liberal" Social Gospel movement. The moment you expect proclaiming the message of Christ to transform people and society in a way that will make society better in your assessment is the moment you're talking about a Social Gospel. There are a lot of Christians out there who are sure they are not advocates of a Social Gospel because they aren't "liberal" but who are still using the Gospel as a method to engineer and advocate for the kind of society they want based on what they believe the Bible teaches. The temptation for Christians left and right is to use Jesus as a means toward a social or political end rather than recognize Him as king.
Having said that, I don't think it is fair or historically accurate to say that only bad came from the Social Gospel movement. Organizations like the Union Gospel Mission, Salvation Army, Vision Nationals are not necessarily evil organizations because they want the Gospel to have some positive influence on the society at large. As I blogged earlier, there is a balance in a mission that needs to be maintained. I wrote there of the necessity of balancing the promotion of the mission and the mission without sacrificing the mission itself (and one must not be so busy only doing the mission that no one knows you exist, there is some need to plan for a future). My observation is that the healthiest Christian organizations maintain a balance between the outreach to bless the community and the desire to share the good news of Christ.
The other balancing act is to be in the world and not of the world. This balance is difficult. Some people say they are not called to wait on tables but to preach the good news. Yet what did those apostles do? They appointed deacons to wait on the tables and deal with the pressing social issues within the local church of that time. A church that proclaims "we are not here to help the poor or the widow or the orphan or to pursue `social justice' issues" is missing the point of the Gospel just as much as a group that promotes civic action without grasping how the sacrificial love of Christ is the fire that guides such action. If we love him because he first loved us that is what enables us to love each other.
So, yes, I believe that Mars Hill and Driscoll particularly promote a Social Gospel. As I said earlier, when you look at how you want a society transformed by Jesus you are describing what KIND of Social Gospel you are pursuing by proclaiming the news of Christ the king, not declaring whether or not you even HAVE a Social Gospel.
For people who never attended Mars Hill, never participated on the discussion forums hosted by the church from 1999-2001 (public)or internal (2002-2007) you're not in a position to observe how Mars Hill has had at its heart (or one of the ventricles thereof) a kind of Social Gospel. I could agree with parts of it but ultimately not enough of it to keep a formal connection there. More and more I began to feel that it was a good news for young men, married men, and parents, than a good news for all. I still have very close friends and family there that I love. In fact one of my best friends is a pastor there and I love him and his wife a great deal. I believe Mars Hill will accomplish good for people ... I just also realized I don't have to be formally connected to it to see that happen. I had let family loyalty, inertia, and the desire to stay close to friends keep me somewhere just long enough to realize that it was time to be somewhere else.
Having said all that, I think that a lot of theologically and politically conservative churches have been pursuing a Social Gospel to compensate for the old liberal kind for decades. Frank Schaeffer's earlier works fit the bill. The more you deny that conservatives have a Social Gospel element to them the more you probably need to repent and realize that conservatives can use Jesus as a means to an end, too, rather than considering Him Lord. When He returns He will reveal the judgment that is coming to the whole cosmos, not just the parts you specifically want Him to judge.
Dan over at Civatatedei wrote a tongue-in-cheek observation about the social gospel of Mars Hill. Having had a connection to Mars Hill that has lasted about a decade I would say that, yes, Dan is totally right. The Mars Hill vision Driscoll has repeatedly articulated that "young men would love Jesus, get jobs, take wives, and make babies" is totally a Social Gospel idea, a vision that through the preaching of the Gospel society will be transformed by Jesus into a better society. The fact that this is not a LEFT-leaning social gospel does not make it any less a social gospel.
When the vision is to see the city transformed by Jesus what do you envision in that changed city? THAT, my friends, is still Social Gospel even if it is not the old-school "liberal" Social Gospel movement. The moment you expect proclaiming the message of Christ to transform people and society in a way that will make society better in your assessment is the moment you're talking about a Social Gospel. There are a lot of Christians out there who are sure they are not advocates of a Social Gospel because they aren't "liberal" but who are still using the Gospel as a method to engineer and advocate for the kind of society they want based on what they believe the Bible teaches. The temptation for Christians left and right is to use Jesus as a means toward a social or political end rather than recognize Him as king.
Having said that, I don't think it is fair or historically accurate to say that only bad came from the Social Gospel movement. Organizations like the Union Gospel Mission, Salvation Army, Vision Nationals are not necessarily evil organizations because they want the Gospel to have some positive influence on the society at large. As I blogged earlier, there is a balance in a mission that needs to be maintained. I wrote there of the necessity of balancing the promotion of the mission and the mission without sacrificing the mission itself (and one must not be so busy only doing the mission that no one knows you exist, there is some need to plan for a future). My observation is that the healthiest Christian organizations maintain a balance between the outreach to bless the community and the desire to share the good news of Christ.
The other balancing act is to be in the world and not of the world. This balance is difficult. Some people say they are not called to wait on tables but to preach the good news. Yet what did those apostles do? They appointed deacons to wait on the tables and deal with the pressing social issues within the local church of that time. A church that proclaims "we are not here to help the poor or the widow or the orphan or to pursue `social justice' issues" is missing the point of the Gospel just as much as a group that promotes civic action without grasping how the sacrificial love of Christ is the fire that guides such action. If we love him because he first loved us that is what enables us to love each other.
So, yes, I believe that Mars Hill and Driscoll particularly promote a Social Gospel. As I said earlier, when you look at how you want a society transformed by Jesus you are describing what KIND of Social Gospel you are pursuing by proclaiming the news of Christ the king, not declaring whether or not you even HAVE a Social Gospel.
For people who never attended Mars Hill, never participated on the discussion forums hosted by the church from 1999-2001 (public)or internal (2002-2007) you're not in a position to observe how Mars Hill has had at its heart (or one of the ventricles thereof) a kind of Social Gospel. I could agree with parts of it but ultimately not enough of it to keep a formal connection there. More and more I began to feel that it was a good news for young men, married men, and parents, than a good news for all. I still have very close friends and family there that I love. In fact one of my best friends is a pastor there and I love him and his wife a great deal. I believe Mars Hill will accomplish good for people ... I just also realized I don't have to be formally connected to it to see that happen. I had let family loyalty, inertia, and the desire to stay close to friends keep me somewhere just long enough to realize that it was time to be somewhere else.
Having said all that, I think that a lot of theologically and politically conservative churches have been pursuing a Social Gospel to compensate for the old liberal kind for decades. Frank Schaeffer's earlier works fit the bill. The more you deny that conservatives have a Social Gospel element to them the more you probably need to repent and realize that conservatives can use Jesus as a means to an end, too, rather than considering Him Lord. When He returns He will reveal the judgment that is coming to the whole cosmos, not just the parts you specifically want Him to judge.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Naked Pastor: Send and Resend [thoughts on how Christian organizations ask so they may keep on asking]
http://www.nakedpastor.com/archives/3906
This cartoon at nakedpastor.com is funny because we have seen organizations, Christian organizations, who seem to be caught up in the process of asking us to send them money just so they can turn around and ask us to give, and give more "sacrificially" to the cause. We may not run into many of them but it isn't long for anyone in America, at least, to get the sense that some Christian organizations are more about promoting the mission than doing the mission, whatever the mission may be.
What I will say is that there can come a point in a Christian organization where the mission slips inexorably and imperceptibly away from doing the mission to promoting the mission. This is a dangerous transformation because it comes slowly and with ample signs of running off the rails but not with any one symptom large enough to signal the derailing of the train. The individual wheels on the tracks are shaky but there is no sign that the train is going to spin off into one of Calvin's better build ups (sorry, Bill Watterson fan, had to throw that in there).
I don't really want to give examples but I can speak in generalities. A warning sign tha tthere is a fundamental problem with mission is if after years of stating that the mission of the Christian organization (or ANY organization) is X then if all the evidence points that X as conceived is just not happening then you need to reassess the entire point of X as the goal of the organization. One of two or three possibilities arise at this point. The first is that X is simply an untenable, impossible goal. The second is that X is a tenable goal but that the organization lacks the competence to attain the goal.
There is, however, a third possibility, that X may be an untenable goal in itself but that it may provide a new possibility for a drastic reconception of the actual mission of the organization. A new organization has the flexibility of completely changing its vision to adapt to what is actually good at. An institution is, if you will, an organization that discovered its vision and mission early and figured out it had the competence and vision to sustain that goal and the goal, since we're looking at it, happens to have been a goal that is both attainable and renewable.
That the goal of an organization should be both attainable and renewable is vital and something a lot of would-be businesses in the so-called "dot com bubble" utterly failed to grasp. There were some organizations that had goals that were unattainable. There were others who had goals that were eminently attainable but not sufficiently renewable enough to make for a viable long-term business. I should know because I worked for a business that had an attainable but not, ultimately, a sustainable business goal. I then ended up working for a hugely well-known non-profit that has a legendarily attainable yet renewable goal informed by a statement by Jesus which goes like this, "The poor you will always have with you". Ergo, there is always an opportunity for a Christian organization to help the poor.
But when an organization's mission becomes more about promoting the mission than accomplishing the mission the organization is in peril.
This cartoon at nakedpastor.com is funny because we have seen organizations, Christian organizations, who seem to be caught up in the process of asking us to send them money just so they can turn around and ask us to give, and give more "sacrificially" to the cause. We may not run into many of them but it isn't long for anyone in America, at least, to get the sense that some Christian organizations are more about promoting the mission than doing the mission, whatever the mission may be.
What I will say is that there can come a point in a Christian organization where the mission slips inexorably and imperceptibly away from doing the mission to promoting the mission. This is a dangerous transformation because it comes slowly and with ample signs of running off the rails but not with any one symptom large enough to signal the derailing of the train. The individual wheels on the tracks are shaky but there is no sign that the train is going to spin off into one of Calvin's better build ups (sorry, Bill Watterson fan, had to throw that in there).
I don't really want to give examples but I can speak in generalities. A warning sign tha tthere is a fundamental problem with mission is if after years of stating that the mission of the Christian organization (or ANY organization) is X then if all the evidence points that X as conceived is just not happening then you need to reassess the entire point of X as the goal of the organization. One of two or three possibilities arise at this point. The first is that X is simply an untenable, impossible goal. The second is that X is a tenable goal but that the organization lacks the competence to attain the goal.
There is, however, a third possibility, that X may be an untenable goal in itself but that it may provide a new possibility for a drastic reconception of the actual mission of the organization. A new organization has the flexibility of completely changing its vision to adapt to what is actually good at. An institution is, if you will, an organization that discovered its vision and mission early and figured out it had the competence and vision to sustain that goal and the goal, since we're looking at it, happens to have been a goal that is both attainable and renewable.
That the goal of an organization should be both attainable and renewable is vital and something a lot of would-be businesses in the so-called "dot com bubble" utterly failed to grasp. There were some organizations that had goals that were unattainable. There were others who had goals that were eminently attainable but not sufficiently renewable enough to make for a viable long-term business. I should know because I worked for a business that had an attainable but not, ultimately, a sustainable business goal. I then ended up working for a hugely well-known non-profit that has a legendarily attainable yet renewable goal informed by a statement by Jesus which goes like this, "The poor you will always have with you". Ergo, there is always an opportunity for a Christian organization to help the poor.
But when an organization's mission becomes more about promoting the mission than accomplishing the mission the organization is in peril.
Thoughts on iMonk's "When Bad People Need a Crutch"
http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/when-bad-people-need-a-crutch
Taking the Lord's name is appropriating the name of the Lord to justify wickedness. That's how a commenter on Internet Monk put it. I halfway agree and only agree halfway because I believe wickedness with respect to our character in contrast to Yahweh involves two different kinds of contrasts.
What is wickedness? It can be using the name of God to approve of things which God does not condone. Using the name of God to justify evil. There are those who call evil good and good evil and the scriptures speak against those people firmly. Calling that which is wrong morally praiseworthy is terrible. Yet Jesus was maligned for being a glutton and a drunkard and a friend of tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners. The man or woman who invokes God's love and forgiveness and his or her own falling out of love with a spouse does not justify divorce or adultery or predatory behavior.
As an aside, people who invoke the Lord's name for some crazy venture like "God said I'm supposed to marry you" will GENERALLY be recognized as insane, unless they keep this news to themselves or, as in the case of Mark Driscoll, he apparently was told by God to marry Grace and plant a church. We Christians can want it both ways. We want to believe God can tell US crazy things that aren't crazy if we're being told them while also believing that if OTHER people are told crazy things they don't apply or that was bad pizza from the night before and not the Lord. God telling Mark he was supposed to marry his girlfriend and plant a church doesn't mean he should have done it how he did it, which has been dawning on him in the last three years after a few sacrifices were made at the altar of his ministry in the form of other people. I hope he gets better about that but I'm not holding my breath.
Yet as Christians the more pernicious invocation of God's name in vain is to invoke His name to justify that which God does not require. This is one of the great dangers of the teaching of the Pharisees, why Jesus said that they sit in Moses' seat and you should do all that they tell you to do but that you SHOULD NOT FOLLOW THEIR EXAMPLE.
This second type of taking the Lord's name in vain is the most dangerous because it is the kind most popular with Christians. I submit that courtship teaching falls perfectly within the teachings of the Pharisees, just as most contemporary examples of arguments for complementarianism can pitch that direction. The problem, however, is not with the idea of complementarianism (since Catholics and Orthodox simply don't ordain women) but how men use the teaching. Consider Jesus' rebuke that men plead "corban" as a way to avoid honoring father and mother. What was permitted and sanctioned by the Mosaic law was transformed by the traditions of men into a way to defraud one's own parents. The Pharisees tithed mint and cumin and neglected the weightier matters of the law. Courtship freaks exemplify this problem for me at so many levels I clearly won't run out of ways to say it.
But the essential problem goes beyond this or that, it gets to our constant temptation to make our own sacrifices the measure of the sacrifices that make for being truly human. A man like Driscoll isn't the only person who may be tempted to think that the sacrifices he thinks he's making for his wife or kids are the measure of true sacrifice and loving devotion. I've seen others fall sway to this temptation. I have seen still others look down on the sacrifices of parenthood or marriage and consider the pursuit of one's own happiness as the highest goal, which simply uses theology as a way to rationalize wanton self-interest as though it were a lofty goal. Toddlers can have a singular interest in their own happiness and getting things their way but many of them grow out of it, and many toddlers have more capacity for empathy than some adults I've met.
The problem is that bad people who use doctrines as crutches to justify their own controlling or abusive behavior don't see that what they do is emotionally manipulative or abusive. They believe they are defending their legitimate rights, little realizing that the defense of one's legitimate rights in the Christian faith is the honor and opportunity to serve others. In fact Christians who employ doctrines or teachings to abuse others will often feel they are the victims. A dad who is a control freak and wants to retroactively put the kibosh on a daughter's dating relationship feels like the victim because things aren't in his control when he's actually the one who may be sinning against his child.
Now I admit that I'm not chomping at the bit to serve others in a lot of ways in my life, I also don't want to say that there is somehow a spiritual advantage to this admission. I hesitate to say God tells me I should do this or that beyond what I can work out from the scriptures, such as I can do. It is also not really my business to tell other people what God has ordained me to do or have, whatever authority is somehow magically invested in me because I am me and God, in His providence, made me super-duper cool.
What people don't realize in many cases about abusers is that they are not strictly black figures, they often have amazing, endearing qualities that make them easy to love, especially early on. What is often not discussed is how the abused can become abusers and how people can embrace the abuser so long as they are not the recipient of the abuse. In sociological studies this is what you would call the "halo effect". Such and such a person is so kind and charming and funny and spot on about so many things it just can't be possible that he or she is an insecure abuser who invokes the name of God or some doctrine that is ostensibly "biblical" to abuse people or cow people. The person who is on our good side can do no wrong while the person on our bad side can do no right. The beauty of James' metaphor about how the fresh water spring cannot give forth salt water is that he goes on to reveal that the human tongue is precisely such a spring, a spring of water that can bless God and curse men. The person who abuses others is defended because, as I have said elsewhere, the neighborhood dog isn't biting its defenders at the moment so they say the dog just needs to be understood. The dog's instincts in biting are fundamentally correct because, well, he's not biting ME and whatever the dog is going after is defensible because "it's biblical".
I have known people who defended this kind of thing just for as long as they felt connected to the good old boy network and didn't bitch about the good old boy network until they were on the outside of it. And then the righteous indignation flowed down like a flood, while I have not seen a lot of acknowledgment that the person was a happy part of the abusive pattern he or she objects to now. In this case it is not enough for us to say that abuse happened but to own our part of that abuse. When we invoke the Lord's name to condemn those who we do not believe measure up to what we think true humanity is, even if we happen to be right, we are not in the right for making that judgment since we are as culpable for falling short of the glory of God ourselves.
But there are others I know who HAVE looked back and realized, with a good deal of dismay, that they were cheering on then what they now consider an abusive leadership style. THIS, my friends, is the kind of repentence that brings joy to the Lord. God does not want me to not be angry about the abuse of spiritual leadership or about emotional manipulation, but I believe He is filled with joy when I can observe in myself a propensity toward spiritual abuse or condoning the spiritual abuse of others by simply being quiet than if I abruptly decide I have to speak out against injustice only because I, finally, feel I have been the subject of it. Self love is a deadly form of love. There is a form of "being passionate about justice" that in the end is merely being passionate about having your own way and I have seen A LOT of that kind of passion for "justice" that is ultimately not really seeking the things of God as much as the things of self. But I also admit that I am not sure what the balance is between seeking justice and being willing to be wronged.
Compartmentalization can make this task more difficult. The pastor who is abusive to his wife and children may see himself as not an abuser because he doesn't harm his parishoners. Conversely, a pastor who is patently abusive to his parishoners or staff or deacons may believe he is not abusive at all simply because he never raises his voice to his wife or children. A husband may be beligerent and even paranoid about "outsiders" who threaten his family without realizing that he is, despite his vigilence, perpetuating an abusive cycle. We can persuade ourselves that we are not who we truly are by dividing ourselves up.
I can persuade myself that I love the Lord far more than I really do if I fixate on theological reading or biblical literature and don't consider how I treat people or how I worship the Lord through the use of my time. I am as susceptible to using theological shortcuts to justify who I am now as anyone, perhaps more so because, at the risk of making an unmerited statement, I'm a relatively smart fellow and that relative smartness is dangerous because the smarter you are the more brilliantly you can delude yourself. I am convinced that you have to be able to lie to yourself before you can lie to others. The father of lies had to believe a lie himself before he became the father of lies, as best I understand things.
We need to see, in many ways, that abuse is evil because it is the perversion of a good. Defending ourselves by avoiding connection or trying to control the kinds of connections we have does not mean we secure ourselves against abuse. Our own desires can be as broken as the conduct of those who we have seen abuse. This does not excuse them but it does mean that we must recognize how we enable abuse, justify abuse, or do not recognize abuse.
Taking the Lord's name is appropriating the name of the Lord to justify wickedness. That's how a commenter on Internet Monk put it. I halfway agree and only agree halfway because I believe wickedness with respect to our character in contrast to Yahweh involves two different kinds of contrasts.
What is wickedness? It can be using the name of God to approve of things which God does not condone. Using the name of God to justify evil. There are those who call evil good and good evil and the scriptures speak against those people firmly. Calling that which is wrong morally praiseworthy is terrible. Yet Jesus was maligned for being a glutton and a drunkard and a friend of tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners. The man or woman who invokes God's love and forgiveness and his or her own falling out of love with a spouse does not justify divorce or adultery or predatory behavior.
As an aside, people who invoke the Lord's name for some crazy venture like "God said I'm supposed to marry you" will GENERALLY be recognized as insane, unless they keep this news to themselves or, as in the case of Mark Driscoll, he apparently was told by God to marry Grace and plant a church. We Christians can want it both ways. We want to believe God can tell US crazy things that aren't crazy if we're being told them while also believing that if OTHER people are told crazy things they don't apply or that was bad pizza from the night before and not the Lord. God telling Mark he was supposed to marry his girlfriend and plant a church doesn't mean he should have done it how he did it, which has been dawning on him in the last three years after a few sacrifices were made at the altar of his ministry in the form of other people. I hope he gets better about that but I'm not holding my breath.
Yet as Christians the more pernicious invocation of God's name in vain is to invoke His name to justify that which God does not require. This is one of the great dangers of the teaching of the Pharisees, why Jesus said that they sit in Moses' seat and you should do all that they tell you to do but that you SHOULD NOT FOLLOW THEIR EXAMPLE.
This second type of taking the Lord's name in vain is the most dangerous because it is the kind most popular with Christians. I submit that courtship teaching falls perfectly within the teachings of the Pharisees, just as most contemporary examples of arguments for complementarianism can pitch that direction. The problem, however, is not with the idea of complementarianism (since Catholics and Orthodox simply don't ordain women) but how men use the teaching. Consider Jesus' rebuke that men plead "corban" as a way to avoid honoring father and mother. What was permitted and sanctioned by the Mosaic law was transformed by the traditions of men into a way to defraud one's own parents. The Pharisees tithed mint and cumin and neglected the weightier matters of the law. Courtship freaks exemplify this problem for me at so many levels I clearly won't run out of ways to say it.
But the essential problem goes beyond this or that, it gets to our constant temptation to make our own sacrifices the measure of the sacrifices that make for being truly human. A man like Driscoll isn't the only person who may be tempted to think that the sacrifices he thinks he's making for his wife or kids are the measure of true sacrifice and loving devotion. I've seen others fall sway to this temptation. I have seen still others look down on the sacrifices of parenthood or marriage and consider the pursuit of one's own happiness as the highest goal, which simply uses theology as a way to rationalize wanton self-interest as though it were a lofty goal. Toddlers can have a singular interest in their own happiness and getting things their way but many of them grow out of it, and many toddlers have more capacity for empathy than some adults I've met.
The problem is that bad people who use doctrines as crutches to justify their own controlling or abusive behavior don't see that what they do is emotionally manipulative or abusive. They believe they are defending their legitimate rights, little realizing that the defense of one's legitimate rights in the Christian faith is the honor and opportunity to serve others. In fact Christians who employ doctrines or teachings to abuse others will often feel they are the victims. A dad who is a control freak and wants to retroactively put the kibosh on a daughter's dating relationship feels like the victim because things aren't in his control when he's actually the one who may be sinning against his child.
Now I admit that I'm not chomping at the bit to serve others in a lot of ways in my life, I also don't want to say that there is somehow a spiritual advantage to this admission. I hesitate to say God tells me I should do this or that beyond what I can work out from the scriptures, such as I can do. It is also not really my business to tell other people what God has ordained me to do or have, whatever authority is somehow magically invested in me because I am me and God, in His providence, made me super-duper cool.
What people don't realize in many cases about abusers is that they are not strictly black figures, they often have amazing, endearing qualities that make them easy to love, especially early on. What is often not discussed is how the abused can become abusers and how people can embrace the abuser so long as they are not the recipient of the abuse. In sociological studies this is what you would call the "halo effect". Such and such a person is so kind and charming and funny and spot on about so many things it just can't be possible that he or she is an insecure abuser who invokes the name of God or some doctrine that is ostensibly "biblical" to abuse people or cow people. The person who is on our good side can do no wrong while the person on our bad side can do no right. The beauty of James' metaphor about how the fresh water spring cannot give forth salt water is that he goes on to reveal that the human tongue is precisely such a spring, a spring of water that can bless God and curse men. The person who abuses others is defended because, as I have said elsewhere, the neighborhood dog isn't biting its defenders at the moment so they say the dog just needs to be understood. The dog's instincts in biting are fundamentally correct because, well, he's not biting ME and whatever the dog is going after is defensible because "it's biblical".
I have known people who defended this kind of thing just for as long as they felt connected to the good old boy network and didn't bitch about the good old boy network until they were on the outside of it. And then the righteous indignation flowed down like a flood, while I have not seen a lot of acknowledgment that the person was a happy part of the abusive pattern he or she objects to now. In this case it is not enough for us to say that abuse happened but to own our part of that abuse. When we invoke the Lord's name to condemn those who we do not believe measure up to what we think true humanity is, even if we happen to be right, we are not in the right for making that judgment since we are as culpable for falling short of the glory of God ourselves.
But there are others I know who HAVE looked back and realized, with a good deal of dismay, that they were cheering on then what they now consider an abusive leadership style. THIS, my friends, is the kind of repentence that brings joy to the Lord. God does not want me to not be angry about the abuse of spiritual leadership or about emotional manipulation, but I believe He is filled with joy when I can observe in myself a propensity toward spiritual abuse or condoning the spiritual abuse of others by simply being quiet than if I abruptly decide I have to speak out against injustice only because I, finally, feel I have been the subject of it. Self love is a deadly form of love. There is a form of "being passionate about justice" that in the end is merely being passionate about having your own way and I have seen A LOT of that kind of passion for "justice" that is ultimately not really seeking the things of God as much as the things of self. But I also admit that I am not sure what the balance is between seeking justice and being willing to be wronged.
Compartmentalization can make this task more difficult. The pastor who is abusive to his wife and children may see himself as not an abuser because he doesn't harm his parishoners. Conversely, a pastor who is patently abusive to his parishoners or staff or deacons may believe he is not abusive at all simply because he never raises his voice to his wife or children. A husband may be beligerent and even paranoid about "outsiders" who threaten his family without realizing that he is, despite his vigilence, perpetuating an abusive cycle. We can persuade ourselves that we are not who we truly are by dividing ourselves up.
I can persuade myself that I love the Lord far more than I really do if I fixate on theological reading or biblical literature and don't consider how I treat people or how I worship the Lord through the use of my time. I am as susceptible to using theological shortcuts to justify who I am now as anyone, perhaps more so because, at the risk of making an unmerited statement, I'm a relatively smart fellow and that relative smartness is dangerous because the smarter you are the more brilliantly you can delude yourself. I am convinced that you have to be able to lie to yourself before you can lie to others. The father of lies had to believe a lie himself before he became the father of lies, as best I understand things.
We need to see, in many ways, that abuse is evil because it is the perversion of a good. Defending ourselves by avoiding connection or trying to control the kinds of connections we have does not mean we secure ourselves against abuse. Our own desires can be as broken as the conduct of those who we have seen abuse. This does not excuse them but it does mean that we must recognize how we enable abuse, justify abuse, or do not recognize abuse.
Monday, October 26, 2009
a little bit of progress here and there
For several months (really only about three) I didn't really compose anything. It was just three months but those months felt like forever. I wasn't composing anything and I wasn't really playing anything much, either. I burned the candle at both ends working on a sonata for viola and guitar for a duo back east. I finally finished the third and final movement of the sonata, a six minute fugue.
I was not actually a music major in college, I studied journalism This did not mean I didn't study music a lot. In fact my music minor was just eight credits away from being a general music major when I graduated, leading some of my closer friends to tell me I should finish a double major. Problem with that was I had limited funds and completing my self-designed major was challenging enough as it was. I could not afford that double major though, in hindsight, I wish I could have finished it. But in the end I don't regret having possibly the largest music minor in the recent history of the institution. All of this is to say that I learned counterpoint by studying on my own, using books suggested by teachers.
So when I say that I finished a six-minute fugue in three voices for viola and guitar I trust you, dear reader, can appreciate that the process of composing such a work constitutes its own compositional juggernaut! I can hardly begin to describe how brutal the challenge was of establishing the subject, getting the first countersubject to work (I went through two or three drafts of just countersubject 1), getting the second countersubject to work (that took years before I found something I liked that followed traditional part-writing rules, presented itself as invertible, AND also could actually be played either by the guitar with another voice or the viola), and then beyond all that working out a suitable set of stretti. I'm going to risk going out on a limb and speaking well of my own work but I have attained competence in the art of writing fugues. I would not say I am a master by any means, that is for Bach and Hindemith and others. I have, however, gotten to a point where I can compose a large fugue for two rather unforgiving instruments.
But this makes me nothing more than a learner, not a master. I am still struggling every step of the way to compose and completing the sonata for viola and guitar doesn't mean I have mastered anything, and it certainly does not mean that the piece will necessarily get performed. What I have attempted to describe here is how I got to a point of exhaustion where I gave up music composing for a few months.
Prior to the sonata for viola and guitar being brought to completion I had worked very hard to finish a sonata for cello and guitar and I finished that in April. That project was not nearly as exhausting but it was still a huge challenge. I have a particular approach to compositions that makes things both easier and more difficult. It makes the work of composing more difficult because I have a steep gradient on what I consider material decent enough to even bother working with, it makes things difficult because there are certain things I look for within and across movements in cyclical works that have to be a certain way before I really latch on to the project.
Yet it makes the work easier in crucial respects. If I still find an idea interesting enough to keep developing it months after I have come up with it and then set it aside to see if I still care about it after leaving it alone months later then I have found material for which I have the emotional committment to keep up the work for as long as it takes. "As long as it takes" can range up to nine years or ten and in the case of some string quartet even longer.
Well, this last weekend I finished composing a prelude in B flat minor for solo guitar to go with my fugue in B flat minor for solo guitar. This means my set of preludes and fugues has come up to seven out of a projected twenty-four. God willing and with a great deal of steady work and determination I plan to complete a set of preludes and fugues for solo guitar. That's all I feel like writing about in this entry for now. It feels good to get back to composing music after a few months of fallow times.
I was not actually a music major in college, I studied journalism This did not mean I didn't study music a lot. In fact my music minor was just eight credits away from being a general music major when I graduated, leading some of my closer friends to tell me I should finish a double major. Problem with that was I had limited funds and completing my self-designed major was challenging enough as it was. I could not afford that double major though, in hindsight, I wish I could have finished it. But in the end I don't regret having possibly the largest music minor in the recent history of the institution. All of this is to say that I learned counterpoint by studying on my own, using books suggested by teachers.
So when I say that I finished a six-minute fugue in three voices for viola and guitar I trust you, dear reader, can appreciate that the process of composing such a work constitutes its own compositional juggernaut! I can hardly begin to describe how brutal the challenge was of establishing the subject, getting the first countersubject to work (I went through two or three drafts of just countersubject 1), getting the second countersubject to work (that took years before I found something I liked that followed traditional part-writing rules, presented itself as invertible, AND also could actually be played either by the guitar with another voice or the viola), and then beyond all that working out a suitable set of stretti. I'm going to risk going out on a limb and speaking well of my own work but I have attained competence in the art of writing fugues. I would not say I am a master by any means, that is for Bach and Hindemith and others. I have, however, gotten to a point where I can compose a large fugue for two rather unforgiving instruments.
But this makes me nothing more than a learner, not a master. I am still struggling every step of the way to compose and completing the sonata for viola and guitar doesn't mean I have mastered anything, and it certainly does not mean that the piece will necessarily get performed. What I have attempted to describe here is how I got to a point of exhaustion where I gave up music composing for a few months.
Prior to the sonata for viola and guitar being brought to completion I had worked very hard to finish a sonata for cello and guitar and I finished that in April. That project was not nearly as exhausting but it was still a huge challenge. I have a particular approach to compositions that makes things both easier and more difficult. It makes the work of composing more difficult because I have a steep gradient on what I consider material decent enough to even bother working with, it makes things difficult because there are certain things I look for within and across movements in cyclical works that have to be a certain way before I really latch on to the project.
Yet it makes the work easier in crucial respects. If I still find an idea interesting enough to keep developing it months after I have come up with it and then set it aside to see if I still care about it after leaving it alone months later then I have found material for which I have the emotional committment to keep up the work for as long as it takes. "As long as it takes" can range up to nine years or ten and in the case of some string quartet even longer.
Well, this last weekend I finished composing a prelude in B flat minor for solo guitar to go with my fugue in B flat minor for solo guitar. This means my set of preludes and fugues has come up to seven out of a projected twenty-four. God willing and with a great deal of steady work and determination I plan to complete a set of preludes and fugues for solo guitar. That's all I feel like writing about in this entry for now. It feels good to get back to composing music after a few months of fallow times.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
On reading the sermons of John Donne and D Martyn Lloyd-Jones
I have been reading through sermons by these two very different sorts of preachers in the last few months and I have to say that I appreciate the insights both men had into the human condition and into the teachings of the Lord and of the scriptures. My thoughts are as yet scattered but several things spring to mind.
The first is that we can't help but benefit from reading old sermons if we have chosen our pastors with care. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and Donne strike me as being among two of the best in the English language from almost any age and it is fascinating how greatly they contrast in style and method and form. Yet any Christian may benefit from studying their works and learn not only about the Lord but also about how to responsibly interpret the scriptures.
What strikes me about their sermons is what is missing that I often hear in contemporary preaching. Neither man seemed to have much use for personal anecdotes as application of a biblical text. I notice that in our time a pastor may cast about for a vignette from his or her own life to demonstrate a way in which a biblical text is somehow exemplified by them at some level. Donne and Martyn Lloyd-Jones never seem to do this. They bring their personalities into their sermons, of course, and yet their personalities are subordinate to the consideration of the message itself.
Reading Donne, particularly, helps me to observe that the fad for expository preaching among Reformed evangelicals is what it is, a fad. There is no certainty that a pastor will stick to the text simply on the basis that the biblical text is read and he is allegedly going to explain what the text means. I have heard a lot of so-called expository preaching that is really anything but that since the text becomes a springboard for the pastor's existing social, political, moral, philosophical, or theological agendas.
Donne does us the favor of explaining his method, a common one since ancient times, in which he will expound upon the literal or historical meaning of the text, discuss its pertinence to the human condition you and I are in, and then discuss how it connects to Christ. It may be described, as some have put it so well as the literal, moral and spiritual consideration of biblical texts.
I should confess I was fond of Donne's poetry before I realized he was also a pastor, I can chalk that up to having learned about him through the works of T. S. Eliot, much the same way I discovered Robert John and others through listening to Bob Dylan and then, as he once advised via interviews, to explore what he explored. His advice was to not consider him the one to copy but to go back into history and copy the people he copied and find your own stuff to copy. Well, that I did. I kept going further and further back in Western music and stopped my journey around William Byrd, Palestrina, and Mauchaut. With T. S. Eliot the path was simply jumping back a few generations to Donne.
What sticks with me about reading Donne and Martyn Lloyd-Jones is how prominent their personalities are displayed in their work but, paradoxically, without drawing attention to themselves. The more modern preacher alludes here and there to things he saw and people he know but there is, in the sermons on the Sermon on the Mount I've been reading, a surprisingly low amount of personal anecdotes in application. Here I observe not merely that this differs from the Mark Driscoll show version of preaching but from a lot of contemporary preaching generally. Donne seems positively unconcerned that anyone learn anything about his life within his preaching which is, frankly, a relief in comparison to hearing other pastors!
Martyn Lloyd-Jones discusses things rather generally about people he knew who seemed to think Christianity was essentially best used as an anti-communist ideology or a tool for political or cultural renewal but he largely withholds the sort of anecdotes I hear in preaching now through which the pastor talks about taking his kids to an athletic event or about how he went on a date with his wife and something happened. Now it is not that there is no place at all for such anecdotes and they can, certainly, aid in establishing a rapport between the pastor and the congregation but Donne and Martyn Lloyd-Jones were, rather obviously, vastly beyond the ken of their flock. Yet this, we see, did not really matter much or keep these pastors from keeping a steady focus on the message of the biblical text.
Now there are pastors I have heard, and could easily name but don't need to, who may spend a quarter to a third of their time having an application of a biblical text that essentially amounts to some version of "This is what I was doing this week" or "This is what is going on in the church right now. The application becomes nothing more than a sales pitch for whatever is already happening or, perhaps in better circumstances, an opportunity for a pastor to confess something. For all the talk some of my friends have made about expository preaching some of the pastors who are most ostensibly known for expository preaching really aren't. As I wrote earlier, it is a vital question to ask what expository preaching really exposes. Does it expose us to the truth of the biblical text or to the opinions of the speaker.
I could go on at some length, really, and that is not my intent. I'm intending to simply plug for the works of two pastors who have passed on whose work I have come to admire, if you happen to be interested and don't already know their work. I have felt it has been necessary for me to read Donne's sermons because it is useful for a man like me to see that immense learning and cultivation of great skill in literary art does not preclude a solid handling of a biblical text and, more importantly, an appreciation of the intensity of the emotions of the Psalms. I am not a man given to thinking highly of mere feelings or considering them reliable engines for the accomplishing of anything good in life. So, at the risk of sticking my neck out here, I need to read Donne because Donne demonstrated through his life and art that my way of going through life on that subject is profoundly mistaken but he does so in a way that invites the consideration of another path. Donne can distill things into a few phrases, such as when he writes in one of his prayers that he asks that God would pardon his sins despite his using that pardon as occasion for more sin so that through him others may see how much sin God can pardon. Donne's genius embraces the fullness of the mind without neglecting the heart, the latter of these two things I have been terrible at. I have not managed to hold on to one without letting go of the other and for this reason Donne's work is becoming a God-send to me.
As for Martyn Lloyd-Jones, I find it helpful to revisit the Sermon on the Mount and the sermons reflecting upon the significance of the sermon of the Lord have been helpful to me. I was for some time at a church that sold itself as being "all about Jesus" but was ultimately in danger of remaining all about Paul and whatever the lead pastor saw fit to read into Old Testament passages. People may yet benefit and dobenefit greatly from that sort of thing but it is helpful for me to study the work of a pastor who did a lengthy set of sermons on the Lord's most famous sermon. That is, for me, a way to make it more solidly "all about Jesus" than was possible in the other setting.
The first is that we can't help but benefit from reading old sermons if we have chosen our pastors with care. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and Donne strike me as being among two of the best in the English language from almost any age and it is fascinating how greatly they contrast in style and method and form. Yet any Christian may benefit from studying their works and learn not only about the Lord but also about how to responsibly interpret the scriptures.
What strikes me about their sermons is what is missing that I often hear in contemporary preaching. Neither man seemed to have much use for personal anecdotes as application of a biblical text. I notice that in our time a pastor may cast about for a vignette from his or her own life to demonstrate a way in which a biblical text is somehow exemplified by them at some level. Donne and Martyn Lloyd-Jones never seem to do this. They bring their personalities into their sermons, of course, and yet their personalities are subordinate to the consideration of the message itself.
Reading Donne, particularly, helps me to observe that the fad for expository preaching among Reformed evangelicals is what it is, a fad. There is no certainty that a pastor will stick to the text simply on the basis that the biblical text is read and he is allegedly going to explain what the text means. I have heard a lot of so-called expository preaching that is really anything but that since the text becomes a springboard for the pastor's existing social, political, moral, philosophical, or theological agendas.
Donne does us the favor of explaining his method, a common one since ancient times, in which he will expound upon the literal or historical meaning of the text, discuss its pertinence to the human condition you and I are in, and then discuss how it connects to Christ. It may be described, as some have put it so well as the literal, moral and spiritual consideration of biblical texts.
I should confess I was fond of Donne's poetry before I realized he was also a pastor, I can chalk that up to having learned about him through the works of T. S. Eliot, much the same way I discovered Robert John and others through listening to Bob Dylan and then, as he once advised via interviews, to explore what he explored. His advice was to not consider him the one to copy but to go back into history and copy the people he copied and find your own stuff to copy. Well, that I did. I kept going further and further back in Western music and stopped my journey around William Byrd, Palestrina, and Mauchaut. With T. S. Eliot the path was simply jumping back a few generations to Donne.
What sticks with me about reading Donne and Martyn Lloyd-Jones is how prominent their personalities are displayed in their work but, paradoxically, without drawing attention to themselves. The more modern preacher alludes here and there to things he saw and people he know but there is, in the sermons on the Sermon on the Mount I've been reading, a surprisingly low amount of personal anecdotes in application. Here I observe not merely that this differs from the Mark Driscoll show version of preaching but from a lot of contemporary preaching generally. Donne seems positively unconcerned that anyone learn anything about his life within his preaching which is, frankly, a relief in comparison to hearing other pastors!
Martyn Lloyd-Jones discusses things rather generally about people he knew who seemed to think Christianity was essentially best used as an anti-communist ideology or a tool for political or cultural renewal but he largely withholds the sort of anecdotes I hear in preaching now through which the pastor talks about taking his kids to an athletic event or about how he went on a date with his wife and something happened. Now it is not that there is no place at all for such anecdotes and they can, certainly, aid in establishing a rapport between the pastor and the congregation but Donne and Martyn Lloyd-Jones were, rather obviously, vastly beyond the ken of their flock. Yet this, we see, did not really matter much or keep these pastors from keeping a steady focus on the message of the biblical text.
Now there are pastors I have heard, and could easily name but don't need to, who may spend a quarter to a third of their time having an application of a biblical text that essentially amounts to some version of "This is what I was doing this week" or "This is what is going on in the church right now. The application becomes nothing more than a sales pitch for whatever is already happening or, perhaps in better circumstances, an opportunity for a pastor to confess something. For all the talk some of my friends have made about expository preaching some of the pastors who are most ostensibly known for expository preaching really aren't. As I wrote earlier, it is a vital question to ask what expository preaching really exposes. Does it expose us to the truth of the biblical text or to the opinions of the speaker.
I could go on at some length, really, and that is not my intent. I'm intending to simply plug for the works of two pastors who have passed on whose work I have come to admire, if you happen to be interested and don't already know their work. I have felt it has been necessary for me to read Donne's sermons because it is useful for a man like me to see that immense learning and cultivation of great skill in literary art does not preclude a solid handling of a biblical text and, more importantly, an appreciation of the intensity of the emotions of the Psalms. I am not a man given to thinking highly of mere feelings or considering them reliable engines for the accomplishing of anything good in life. So, at the risk of sticking my neck out here, I need to read Donne because Donne demonstrated through his life and art that my way of going through life on that subject is profoundly mistaken but he does so in a way that invites the consideration of another path. Donne can distill things into a few phrases, such as when he writes in one of his prayers that he asks that God would pardon his sins despite his using that pardon as occasion for more sin so that through him others may see how much sin God can pardon. Donne's genius embraces the fullness of the mind without neglecting the heart, the latter of these two things I have been terrible at. I have not managed to hold on to one without letting go of the other and for this reason Donne's work is becoming a God-send to me.
As for Martyn Lloyd-Jones, I find it helpful to revisit the Sermon on the Mount and the sermons reflecting upon the significance of the sermon of the Lord have been helpful to me. I was for some time at a church that sold itself as being "all about Jesus" but was ultimately in danger of remaining all about Paul and whatever the lead pastor saw fit to read into Old Testament passages. People may yet benefit and dobenefit greatly from that sort of thing but it is helpful for me to study the work of a pastor who did a lengthy set of sermons on the Lord's most famous sermon. That is, for me, a way to make it more solidly "all about Jesus" than was possible in the other setting.
some reflections after reading a sermon by John Donne
preached in Whitehall on the first Sunday in Lent:
(excerpt)
...
Every man is but a sponge, and but a sponge filled with tears; and whether you lay your right hand or your left upon a full sponge, it will weep. Whether God lay his left hand, temporal calamities, or his right hand, temporal prosperity; even that temporal prosperity comes always accompanied with so much anxiety in our selves, so much uncertainty in itself, and so much envy in others as that man who abounds most, that sponge shall weep.
...
If we will not come near the miseries of our brethren, if we will not see them, we will never weep over them, never be affected towards them.
...
I am far from concluding all to be impenitent, that do not acually weep and shed tears; I know there are constitutions, complexions, that do not afford them. And yet the worst epithet, which the best Poet could fix upon Pluto himself, was to call him Illachrymabilis, a person that could not weep. But to weep for other things, and not weep for sin, or if not to tears, yet not to come to that tenderness, to that melting, to that thawing, that resolving of the bowels which good souls feel; this is a sponge (I said before, every man is a sponge) this is a sponge dried up into a pumice stone; the lightness, the hollowness of a sponge is there still, but (as the pumice is) dried in the Aetnaes of lust, of ambition, of other flames in this world.
This is quite a bit of exerpted material from one of John Donne's sermons and I share it because these passages, beyond the general impression the sermon made on me, jumped out at me. As I have come into my middle thirties I have begun to do what I never dreamed of doing in my twenties or teens, I am marking up the books I own and am highlighting passages that stick with me.
A word of clarification about the final excerpt, Donne, as was his wont and the wont of everyone back then, used unusual spellings compared to our time. I have taken the liberty to use modern spelling in most cases but dug up the reference to Aetnaes and have left that spelling as is. Mt. Etna is the largest volcano in Europe and unless one knows one's way around distaff spellings from four centuries ago one would be hard-pressed to simply know what Donne's reference indicates beyond it being something bad that leeches moisture from a sponge. Yet, being the genius poet that he was Donne tips us off with reference to pumice and playing off sponge and pumice.
Donne vividly outlines that an incapacity to weep may not always mean this but that it can reveal that one is a sponge dried up into a pumice stone. We lose our capacity to weep at the expense of becoming inhuman. As Donne so brilliantly articulated in another sermon the best of all men was called a man of sorrows by the prophet for good cause. To be unable to weep was the epithet given to Pluto, god of the underworld. Donne here strategically evokes the inability to weep in connection to the pagan deity of the realm of the dead. Pluto had dominion over the dead, the dying, and those who fall in combat. To keep playing with cross-language associations, the ruler of Hades was said to not weep. Typologically it may not have been Donne's intent to note that Satan is beyond weeping but the implication in his intersecting literary and biblical allusions and observation about the human condition suggests that to lose the ability to weep is to lose one's humanity. To withhold one's capacity for weeping is to withhold one's capacity of empathy and humanity.
To love ourselves, to be satisfied in our selves, to find an omni-sufficiency in our selves is an intrustion, a usurpation upon God; and even God himself who had that omni-sufficiency in himself, conceived a conveniency for his glory, to draw a circumference about that center, creatures about himself, and to shed forth lines of love upon all them and not to love himself alone. Self love in man sinks deep; but yet you see the Apostle in his order casts the other sin lower, that is, unto a worse place, to be without natural affection.
As Donne puts it, the Apostle describes that in the later days difficult times will come, when people will be lovers of self and, as Donne claims, further down from the likeness of God than even that is the simple incapacity to love. To be unloving is worse than to be a lover of self. The person who loves himself has become like God but in a dangerous way, a way that imperils himself and people around him. God, having the very self-sufficiency we aspire to have, did not consider that self-sufficiency an end unto itself and created the cosmos to receive His love. Here I mention in passing that David Martyn Lloyd Jones made the salient observation that it was in Paradise itself that Adam turned from God, a sober reminder that even in the best of external circumstances our hearts can be tempted to disobey God.
Earlier in his sermon Donne poses a fascinating question regarding those who do not weep. It is so fascinating I feel it is vital to share it. By way of preparation in Rev 3:17 says that the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd and will guide them to springs of living water (Ps 23 anyone?) and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.:
And when God shall come to that last Act in the glorifying of Man, when he promises, to wipe all tears from his eyes, what shall God have to do with that eye that never wept?
If you cannot find it in your heart to weep for anything then what tears are there for Christ to wipe from your eyes when He returns? While there is such a thing as ungodly sorrow and plenty of it in this life our capacity to weep means that we are not, despite all our sins, demons. Even Esau wept bitter tears of worldly sorrow but he was able to weep over his mistake, while Satan when presented with the proof of his failure before God in the book of Job simply retorts that God has not yet been proven wrong, which would happen eventually.
In case I didn't mention the preaching text Donne used for the sermon, "Jesus wept". I have more to say about reading Donne's sermons but that I am saving for another entry.
(excerpt)
...
Every man is but a sponge, and but a sponge filled with tears; and whether you lay your right hand or your left upon a full sponge, it will weep. Whether God lay his left hand, temporal calamities, or his right hand, temporal prosperity; even that temporal prosperity comes always accompanied with so much anxiety in our selves, so much uncertainty in itself, and so much envy in others as that man who abounds most, that sponge shall weep.
...
If we will not come near the miseries of our brethren, if we will not see them, we will never weep over them, never be affected towards them.
...
I am far from concluding all to be impenitent, that do not acually weep and shed tears; I know there are constitutions, complexions, that do not afford them. And yet the worst epithet, which the best Poet could fix upon Pluto himself, was to call him Illachrymabilis, a person that could not weep. But to weep for other things, and not weep for sin, or if not to tears, yet not to come to that tenderness, to that melting, to that thawing, that resolving of the bowels which good souls feel; this is a sponge (I said before, every man is a sponge) this is a sponge dried up into a pumice stone; the lightness, the hollowness of a sponge is there still, but (as the pumice is) dried in the Aetnaes of lust, of ambition, of other flames in this world.
This is quite a bit of exerpted material from one of John Donne's sermons and I share it because these passages, beyond the general impression the sermon made on me, jumped out at me. As I have come into my middle thirties I have begun to do what I never dreamed of doing in my twenties or teens, I am marking up the books I own and am highlighting passages that stick with me.
A word of clarification about the final excerpt, Donne, as was his wont and the wont of everyone back then, used unusual spellings compared to our time. I have taken the liberty to use modern spelling in most cases but dug up the reference to Aetnaes and have left that spelling as is. Mt. Etna is the largest volcano in Europe and unless one knows one's way around distaff spellings from four centuries ago one would be hard-pressed to simply know what Donne's reference indicates beyond it being something bad that leeches moisture from a sponge. Yet, being the genius poet that he was Donne tips us off with reference to pumice and playing off sponge and pumice.
Donne vividly outlines that an incapacity to weep may not always mean this but that it can reveal that one is a sponge dried up into a pumice stone. We lose our capacity to weep at the expense of becoming inhuman. As Donne so brilliantly articulated in another sermon the best of all men was called a man of sorrows by the prophet for good cause. To be unable to weep was the epithet given to Pluto, god of the underworld. Donne here strategically evokes the inability to weep in connection to the pagan deity of the realm of the dead. Pluto had dominion over the dead, the dying, and those who fall in combat. To keep playing with cross-language associations, the ruler of Hades was said to not weep. Typologically it may not have been Donne's intent to note that Satan is beyond weeping but the implication in his intersecting literary and biblical allusions and observation about the human condition suggests that to lose the ability to weep is to lose one's humanity. To withhold one's capacity for weeping is to withhold one's capacity of empathy and humanity.
To love ourselves, to be satisfied in our selves, to find an omni-sufficiency in our selves is an intrustion, a usurpation upon God; and even God himself who had that omni-sufficiency in himself, conceived a conveniency for his glory, to draw a circumference about that center, creatures about himself, and to shed forth lines of love upon all them and not to love himself alone. Self love in man sinks deep; but yet you see the Apostle in his order casts the other sin lower, that is, unto a worse place, to be without natural affection.
As Donne puts it, the Apostle describes that in the later days difficult times will come, when people will be lovers of self and, as Donne claims, further down from the likeness of God than even that is the simple incapacity to love. To be unloving is worse than to be a lover of self. The person who loves himself has become like God but in a dangerous way, a way that imperils himself and people around him. God, having the very self-sufficiency we aspire to have, did not consider that self-sufficiency an end unto itself and created the cosmos to receive His love. Here I mention in passing that David Martyn Lloyd Jones made the salient observation that it was in Paradise itself that Adam turned from God, a sober reminder that even in the best of external circumstances our hearts can be tempted to disobey God.
Earlier in his sermon Donne poses a fascinating question regarding those who do not weep. It is so fascinating I feel it is vital to share it. By way of preparation in Rev 3:17 says that the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd and will guide them to springs of living water (Ps 23 anyone?) and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.:
And when God shall come to that last Act in the glorifying of Man, when he promises, to wipe all tears from his eyes, what shall God have to do with that eye that never wept?
If you cannot find it in your heart to weep for anything then what tears are there for Christ to wipe from your eyes when He returns? While there is such a thing as ungodly sorrow and plenty of it in this life our capacity to weep means that we are not, despite all our sins, demons. Even Esau wept bitter tears of worldly sorrow but he was able to weep over his mistake, while Satan when presented with the proof of his failure before God in the book of Job simply retorts that God has not yet been proven wrong, which would happen eventually.
In case I didn't mention the preaching text Donne used for the sermon, "Jesus wept". I have more to say about reading Donne's sermons but that I am saving for another entry.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Let another praise you and not your own mouth, a stranger and not your own lips--ethics
Perhaps the domain of life in which Proverbs 27:2 sticks with me most lately is ethics and reputation. I have known a few people, Christians, who have been set on defending their own honor and dignity. What is curious about one of these Christians is he is also fond of Ayn Rand lately and fond of propounding the idea that dignity and respect are not inherent but most be earned. I would like to know how this fellow reconciles his insistence that dignity in humans is not inherent but most be earned with his conviction that abortion is morally wrong, since a woman could decide that her rights and body supercede the consideration of a fetus who has not as yet justified its existence by earning the dignity and respect which are not inherent to its contingent life. I'm waiting to hear back from him about how he reconciles the live for yourself and humans have to earn their dignity with his opposition to abortion. It may take him a while, he's not as grand a philosopher as he thinks he is.
Meanwhile, when one's integrity and honor are called into question it hurts. When someone assumes the worst about your character there is nothing you can say that will change that. A brother offended is more difficult to win over than a fortified tower. This highlights the essential problem with defending your own honor and integrity is that the very nature of honor and integrity is that it is given and received, earned through the testimony of your life, word, and works. The very nature of honor is that it is given to you by others and the nature of integrity is that it speaks of your character precisely when you are whoever you are, not simply you you think you are.
If, then, you defend your honor you are defending the reputation you think other people should have about you based on your assessment of yourself, which may or may not be realistic and sober-minded as the scriptures urge us it to be. Additionally, your integrity is displayed by how you speak and act toward others and, if you have it, can be spoken for on your behalf by others. The harder you try to defend your honor and integrity instead of letting those speak for themselves in day-to-day life the more you risk revealing the possibility that by so vigorously defending the two you may find you have neither.
Those who profess Christ can easily forget these things. Indeed, when a crisis comes there are some Christians who do not realize that some Galilean peasant named Jesus said whoever humbles himself will be exalted and whoever exalts himself will be humbled. I have seen men exalt themselves and then end up being humbled. I have seen people pretend to humility while ultimately exalting themselves. I have, however, seen some humble people who have, at length, been exalted sometimes despite the fact that they are still profoundly flawed, sinful people. I have seen men defend their own honor and integrity and not realize that their reputations preceded them, which was precisely why they did not appear to even have honor or integrity evenif they may have had it in some form or another.
Those who consider themselves to be worthy of being great or highly esteemed tend to believe their reputations have been hurt more badly than it actually has been. If you are offended that your view of yourself has been harmed that may not mean your actual reputation has suffered. I don't mean to suggest that one does not speak up for one's own honor or dignity in the face of abuse, but that honor and dignity come from bearing the image of God. Let another praise you and not your own mouth, after all I have just seen too much of men who take offense when their reputations, they believe, have been dragged through the mud without considering how often they themselves dragged the reputation of others through the mud, perhaps not so far as libel or slander but bad enough.
Those who praise themselves eventually come under derision. In the last ten years of his life Michael Jackson became the butt of endless jokes about his transformation from a black man to a white woman, or that he was a child molester, and the like. In fact if we were to hazard a guess as to the time when this mutation in public perception happened it might have begun to happen around the time he crowned himself King of Pop. It is to Mr. Presley's credit he did not much like the label "King of Rock and Roll".
The proverbs are not as straightforward as first appears. Many of the proverbs are nearly riddles that invite us to reflect on how and why they are true. The proverbs are in their own way mercurial and limited yet that amounts to another consideration for another time.
Meanwhile, when one's integrity and honor are called into question it hurts. When someone assumes the worst about your character there is nothing you can say that will change that. A brother offended is more difficult to win over than a fortified tower. This highlights the essential problem with defending your own honor and integrity is that the very nature of honor and integrity is that it is given and received, earned through the testimony of your life, word, and works. The very nature of honor is that it is given to you by others and the nature of integrity is that it speaks of your character precisely when you are whoever you are, not simply you you think you are.
If, then, you defend your honor you are defending the reputation you think other people should have about you based on your assessment of yourself, which may or may not be realistic and sober-minded as the scriptures urge us it to be. Additionally, your integrity is displayed by how you speak and act toward others and, if you have it, can be spoken for on your behalf by others. The harder you try to defend your honor and integrity instead of letting those speak for themselves in day-to-day life the more you risk revealing the possibility that by so vigorously defending the two you may find you have neither.
Those who profess Christ can easily forget these things. Indeed, when a crisis comes there are some Christians who do not realize that some Galilean peasant named Jesus said whoever humbles himself will be exalted and whoever exalts himself will be humbled. I have seen men exalt themselves and then end up being humbled. I have seen people pretend to humility while ultimately exalting themselves. I have, however, seen some humble people who have, at length, been exalted sometimes despite the fact that they are still profoundly flawed, sinful people. I have seen men defend their own honor and integrity and not realize that their reputations preceded them, which was precisely why they did not appear to even have honor or integrity evenif they may have had it in some form or another.
Those who consider themselves to be worthy of being great or highly esteemed tend to believe their reputations have been hurt more badly than it actually has been. If you are offended that your view of yourself has been harmed that may not mean your actual reputation has suffered. I don't mean to suggest that one does not speak up for one's own honor or dignity in the face of abuse, but that honor and dignity come from bearing the image of God. Let another praise you and not your own mouth, after all I have just seen too much of men who take offense when their reputations, they believe, have been dragged through the mud without considering how often they themselves dragged the reputation of others through the mud, perhaps not so far as libel or slander but bad enough.
Those who praise themselves eventually come under derision. In the last ten years of his life Michael Jackson became the butt of endless jokes about his transformation from a black man to a white woman, or that he was a child molester, and the like. In fact if we were to hazard a guess as to the time when this mutation in public perception happened it might have begun to happen around the time he crowned himself King of Pop. It is to Mr. Presley's credit he did not much like the label "King of Rock and Roll".
The proverbs are not as straightforward as first appears. Many of the proverbs are nearly riddles that invite us to reflect on how and why they are true. The proverbs are in their own way mercurial and limited yet that amounts to another consideration for another time.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Let another praise you and not your own mouth, a stranger and not your own lips--the arts
Now if I were to say that Hilary Hahn is a brilliant violinest, a thoughtful musician and a beautiful woman this praise would not seem too extravagant because, after all, she IS a brilliant violinist, a thoughtful musician, and a beautiful woman. Few things are sexier than a smart, beautiful woman who plays music by Bela Bartok and Charles Ives!
Now if Hahn were to say this about HERSELF it would seem self-aggrandizing and might even vitiate those claims, perhaps not completely, but significantly. Perhaps her publicist would receive the credit or blame for describing her in these terms, but I submit that if she gave this praise to herself and was entirely serious that it would diminish her stature (figuratively, if you've ever seen her in person you know she's not a giant).
I am considering this because self-promotion is obviously a part of the arts and, I must confess, one of the things I really dislike having to ever do. I have what is probably the naive notion that the quality of one's work will speak for (or, just as importantly against) itself. I have also seen a few people in my life delude themselves into thinking they have what it takes to become artists of some kind. This troubles me not just for the sake of friends who look like they are setting themselves up for the colloquial "epic fail" but for the sake of people who don't realize they are essentially buying into their own hype.
Yet I can muster some sympathy for these people who are precipitously buying their own hype through hope and ambition, because I have shared in those idealistic dreams of becoming an established artist or musician or writer who can actually get paid money by people for doing something in the arts. I can't really look down on someone who wants to write a novel and have it published and make money off of it I may privately question the wisdom of planning out a trilogy of novels when one hasn't so much as published a single short story in his or her life but I can't fault a person for aspiring to write. Writing is wonderful.
In the same way I can't fault someone for loving the visual arts. My older niece has been getting into the arts and I have been pleased to see her plugging away at different ways of using colors. She is now 8 and last year impressed me with a monochromatic composition in which she used different shades of yellow-orange to denote the background (darkest), middle-ground (medium), and foreground/subject (lightest). She may well have been copying something she saw somewhere else and it's great for an eight year old girl to do that, I'm still positively pleased that she made a crayon drawing of a bumblebee browsing flowers that employed different shades of a single hue to create the sense of spatial relationships. I'm a proud uncle who is happy to brag about his niece. She may not be able to consciously articulate why she even did what she did but she did a good job, especially for her age. At the risk of trafficking in too many proverbs, those who really care about the arts tend to care about them early. What we often describe as "talent" emerging at an early age is often simply the application of disciplined action out of unaffected love.
I have come to wonder if unaffected and affected love may be the most telling difference between an artist and the poser. It may be the blunt line of demarcation between knowing you have worked to get where you are (even if that's "nowhere") and thinking too much of your work and simply believing your own hype. It turns out the line is not very subtle and can be summed up in the proverb about receiving praise from others and not praising ourselves. I have seen at least two negative examples of this in my life over the last ten years but here I will only discuss one of them.
I had a friend for a while who was aspiring to be an artist--not a particularly close friend all things considered, more of an acquaintence in the end. She had some raw potential to be an artist (and still does) but all of her paintings essentially amounted to the same thing with a handful of variations on her subject. She never varied her color pallete, always a combination of warm colors with a few neutrals and some cooler hues. Thirty or so paintings all looked pretty much the same. She was (and is) a one-trick pony.
Now this would be fine by itself. She has, at best, a slightly higher-than-average equivalent of a high school education (home-schooled). No one would expect her to have a particularly sophisticated grasp of the elements and principles of design. She does not come from a particularly artistic family.
Her trouble is that, unfortunately, she has her paintings priced four to five times beyond what anyone would reasonably expect to pay for her work, given how obvious it is that she's a one-trick pony with no real formal training. Precisely how she arrived at her exorbitant prices is still something of a mystery but the second I saw the actual prices she was asking for I realized she was asking for anywhere between five to even ten times as much money as her paintings were worth. She had her works displayed in a few little spots around the city over a few years and people would come by and remark how they might consider buying one of the paintings but few actually bought one. To the extent that anyone has bought her paintings they might realisticallly be considered as much a form of rental assistance as paying for the worth of the painting itself. This was a girl who as yet has not displayed a keen insight for picking reliable roommates.
So far as I know she isn't even painting anymore and has moved on to photography. Her photographs, give or take a few nice, lucky shots, reflect the kind of design sensibility I have seen in 9 year olds, I'm afraid. She is clearly not thinking through her approach to composition so much as indulging in a child-like curiosity about everything around her.
Still, that will be good, if it spurs her to continue developing her craft as an artist ... but I hesitate to call her an artist at all. The youthful impulse to find something that "fits", that you can do without it feeling like too much actual work, is understandable. It is also how almost any person at any age fancies themselves to be into the arts when they are more into feeling special. That's what boyfriends and girlfriends are for, right?
Right now she is simply another home-schooled kid with the equivalent of a high school diploma who has dreams of being an artist and doesn't realize that when you're literally a nobody in the art world you command "nobody" prices. A few friends have bought her paintings, friends in the sense of being supportive of her rather than necessarilly people she actually treats as friends, but I fear these friends have sent the wrong message to this girl. She may infer from the friendliness of friends that her prices for her mostly unsold paintings are reasonable.
Not merely to speak of others, when I was in a band ten years ago that band never went anywhere. We just didn't find a real audience for what it was we were doing and living life was just too important to set other considerations aside, especially after the drummer got married and he and his wife had their third child. It was sad to see the band spinning its wheels for years but an honest assessment of the situation is simply that the band wasn't going to go anywhere despite our faith that our material was solid. Your own estimation of the quality of your work simply doesn't matter if OTHER PEOPLE don't believe in the quality of your work.
There is an old song that says, "you're nobody til somebody loves you."
Where working in the arts is concerned that "somebody" is the stranger. We do not get validation in our capacities as artists from family or friends, though they may encourage us. You discover whether or not your work (whatever it is) speaks to someone and brings some joy or insight or thought to their lives when the stranger invests in what you do.
The reason the young girl with aspirations of being an artist remains a nobody and will remain a nobody is because she has not done work that has won over a stranger. The stranger can look at her work and not be biased by the optimism of seeing the potential for more in what she is doing. The stranger will simply see the actual work itself, in its entirety, and probably be able to say, "Well, she's obviously a one-trick pony who has an unrealistic sense of the monetary worth of that trick and lacks the imagination to risk displaying and exploring other visual concepts.
Until she lowers her prices, branches out to doing more than forty iterations of the same thing, and comes to a more realistic assessment of what a nobody she is, she won't even be an artist, just a poser with delusions of grandeur. I wish it were otherwise, but my suggestions that she apprentice with established artists and learn more of the conceptual and technical tools of the trade seem to have gone without any consideration.
She will, I'm afraid, be better off as someone's girlfriend or wife and get her sense of feeling special or unique from that, which means she's defaulting to the upbringing she seems to have had: that becoming some man's woman was the highest earthly goal for her. As the soldierly axiom has it, when the crisis hits you revert to training and given that her training seems to have been to become a significant other I shouldn't be surprised if that's what she has settled on, even if she might consider that a rebellious act in terms of how she has attained that status. If she is serious about the arts I hope she persists but over the last two or three years I haven't seen any compelling evidence she is that serious about it yet. I don't have much confidence in her because she has too much confidence in herself in contrast to her actual competence, which seems to be a generational weakness in the family.
My hope for this girl, if she is serious about art, is that she will take seriously the implications that people are not yet willing to pay for her work who do not already know her in a social setting. I say this as a sympathetic nobody. If she believes her prices are fair the power of the art market will disabuse her of her illusions. The power of the artist is to create but the power of everyone else is to decide to pay or not pay money for that. She'll have to let someone else praise her work through actually buying it instead of thinking of herself as a capable artist because her ego requires that, her parents sold her on the idea, or her thinking she should be able to command this or that price because people she knows charge the same thing.
But there is hope for her if she gets a dose of reality, which reality tends to provide regardless of our feelings about it! If it turns out she just wants to make money there's always getting a real job. If it turns out she wants to feel special she's young and pretty enough to get almost any boy she would consent to be with. One of the advantages of youth is that beauty can sometimes compensate for undeveloped character among paramours who are willing to accept that trade off.
Despite what I have written I am more optimistic for her sake than for others I have met.
This proverb about letting others praise you rather than yourself also has application in ethics and I may turn to that application in the next few days.
Now if Hahn were to say this about HERSELF it would seem self-aggrandizing and might even vitiate those claims, perhaps not completely, but significantly. Perhaps her publicist would receive the credit or blame for describing her in these terms, but I submit that if she gave this praise to herself and was entirely serious that it would diminish her stature (figuratively, if you've ever seen her in person you know she's not a giant).
I am considering this because self-promotion is obviously a part of the arts and, I must confess, one of the things I really dislike having to ever do. I have what is probably the naive notion that the quality of one's work will speak for (or, just as importantly against) itself. I have also seen a few people in my life delude themselves into thinking they have what it takes to become artists of some kind. This troubles me not just for the sake of friends who look like they are setting themselves up for the colloquial "epic fail" but for the sake of people who don't realize they are essentially buying into their own hype.
Yet I can muster some sympathy for these people who are precipitously buying their own hype through hope and ambition, because I have shared in those idealistic dreams of becoming an established artist or musician or writer who can actually get paid money by people for doing something in the arts. I can't really look down on someone who wants to write a novel and have it published and make money off of it I may privately question the wisdom of planning out a trilogy of novels when one hasn't so much as published a single short story in his or her life but I can't fault a person for aspiring to write. Writing is wonderful.
In the same way I can't fault someone for loving the visual arts. My older niece has been getting into the arts and I have been pleased to see her plugging away at different ways of using colors. She is now 8 and last year impressed me with a monochromatic composition in which she used different shades of yellow-orange to denote the background (darkest), middle-ground (medium), and foreground/subject (lightest). She may well have been copying something she saw somewhere else and it's great for an eight year old girl to do that, I'm still positively pleased that she made a crayon drawing of a bumblebee browsing flowers that employed different shades of a single hue to create the sense of spatial relationships. I'm a proud uncle who is happy to brag about his niece. She may not be able to consciously articulate why she even did what she did but she did a good job, especially for her age. At the risk of trafficking in too many proverbs, those who really care about the arts tend to care about them early. What we often describe as "talent" emerging at an early age is often simply the application of disciplined action out of unaffected love.
I have come to wonder if unaffected and affected love may be the most telling difference between an artist and the poser. It may be the blunt line of demarcation between knowing you have worked to get where you are (even if that's "nowhere") and thinking too much of your work and simply believing your own hype. It turns out the line is not very subtle and can be summed up in the proverb about receiving praise from others and not praising ourselves. I have seen at least two negative examples of this in my life over the last ten years but here I will only discuss one of them.
I had a friend for a while who was aspiring to be an artist--not a particularly close friend all things considered, more of an acquaintence in the end. She had some raw potential to be an artist (and still does) but all of her paintings essentially amounted to the same thing with a handful of variations on her subject. She never varied her color pallete, always a combination of warm colors with a few neutrals and some cooler hues. Thirty or so paintings all looked pretty much the same. She was (and is) a one-trick pony.
Now this would be fine by itself. She has, at best, a slightly higher-than-average equivalent of a high school education (home-schooled). No one would expect her to have a particularly sophisticated grasp of the elements and principles of design. She does not come from a particularly artistic family.
Her trouble is that, unfortunately, she has her paintings priced four to five times beyond what anyone would reasonably expect to pay for her work, given how obvious it is that she's a one-trick pony with no real formal training. Precisely how she arrived at her exorbitant prices is still something of a mystery but the second I saw the actual prices she was asking for I realized she was asking for anywhere between five to even ten times as much money as her paintings were worth. She had her works displayed in a few little spots around the city over a few years and people would come by and remark how they might consider buying one of the paintings but few actually bought one. To the extent that anyone has bought her paintings they might realisticallly be considered as much a form of rental assistance as paying for the worth of the painting itself. This was a girl who as yet has not displayed a keen insight for picking reliable roommates.
So far as I know she isn't even painting anymore and has moved on to photography. Her photographs, give or take a few nice, lucky shots, reflect the kind of design sensibility I have seen in 9 year olds, I'm afraid. She is clearly not thinking through her approach to composition so much as indulging in a child-like curiosity about everything around her.
Still, that will be good, if it spurs her to continue developing her craft as an artist ... but I hesitate to call her an artist at all. The youthful impulse to find something that "fits", that you can do without it feeling like too much actual work, is understandable. It is also how almost any person at any age fancies themselves to be into the arts when they are more into feeling special. That's what boyfriends and girlfriends are for, right?
Right now she is simply another home-schooled kid with the equivalent of a high school diploma who has dreams of being an artist and doesn't realize that when you're literally a nobody in the art world you command "nobody" prices. A few friends have bought her paintings, friends in the sense of being supportive of her rather than necessarilly people she actually treats as friends, but I fear these friends have sent the wrong message to this girl. She may infer from the friendliness of friends that her prices for her mostly unsold paintings are reasonable.
Not merely to speak of others, when I was in a band ten years ago that band never went anywhere. We just didn't find a real audience for what it was we were doing and living life was just too important to set other considerations aside, especially after the drummer got married and he and his wife had their third child. It was sad to see the band spinning its wheels for years but an honest assessment of the situation is simply that the band wasn't going to go anywhere despite our faith that our material was solid. Your own estimation of the quality of your work simply doesn't matter if OTHER PEOPLE don't believe in the quality of your work.
There is an old song that says, "you're nobody til somebody loves you."
Where working in the arts is concerned that "somebody" is the stranger. We do not get validation in our capacities as artists from family or friends, though they may encourage us. You discover whether or not your work (whatever it is) speaks to someone and brings some joy or insight or thought to their lives when the stranger invests in what you do.
The reason the young girl with aspirations of being an artist remains a nobody and will remain a nobody is because she has not done work that has won over a stranger. The stranger can look at her work and not be biased by the optimism of seeing the potential for more in what she is doing. The stranger will simply see the actual work itself, in its entirety, and probably be able to say, "Well, she's obviously a one-trick pony who has an unrealistic sense of the monetary worth of that trick and lacks the imagination to risk displaying and exploring other visual concepts.
Until she lowers her prices, branches out to doing more than forty iterations of the same thing, and comes to a more realistic assessment of what a nobody she is, she won't even be an artist, just a poser with delusions of grandeur. I wish it were otherwise, but my suggestions that she apprentice with established artists and learn more of the conceptual and technical tools of the trade seem to have gone without any consideration.
She will, I'm afraid, be better off as someone's girlfriend or wife and get her sense of feeling special or unique from that, which means she's defaulting to the upbringing she seems to have had: that becoming some man's woman was the highest earthly goal for her. As the soldierly axiom has it, when the crisis hits you revert to training and given that her training seems to have been to become a significant other I shouldn't be surprised if that's what she has settled on, even if she might consider that a rebellious act in terms of how she has attained that status. If she is serious about the arts I hope she persists but over the last two or three years I haven't seen any compelling evidence she is that serious about it yet. I don't have much confidence in her because she has too much confidence in herself in contrast to her actual competence, which seems to be a generational weakness in the family.
My hope for this girl, if she is serious about art, is that she will take seriously the implications that people are not yet willing to pay for her work who do not already know her in a social setting. I say this as a sympathetic nobody. If she believes her prices are fair the power of the art market will disabuse her of her illusions. The power of the artist is to create but the power of everyone else is to decide to pay or not pay money for that. She'll have to let someone else praise her work through actually buying it instead of thinking of herself as a capable artist because her ego requires that, her parents sold her on the idea, or her thinking she should be able to command this or that price because people she knows charge the same thing.
But there is hope for her if she gets a dose of reality, which reality tends to provide regardless of our feelings about it! If it turns out she just wants to make money there's always getting a real job. If it turns out she wants to feel special she's young and pretty enough to get almost any boy she would consent to be with. One of the advantages of youth is that beauty can sometimes compensate for undeveloped character among paramours who are willing to accept that trade off.
Despite what I have written I am more optimistic for her sake than for others I have met.
This proverb about letting others praise you rather than yourself also has application in ethics and I may turn to that application in the next few days.
Let another praise you and not your own mouth, a stranger, and not your own lips--job hunting
Sometimes I wonder if in ancient Isrelite culture people had anything equivalent to resumes. Resumes are supposed to be great big, grand, brief, but honest advertisments for why YOU ... SHOULD HAVE THIS JOB. I so wish I was thinking about this topic for abstract reasons!
Ancient Jewish culture just doesn't come off like the kind of place where anyone wrote resumes saying, "This is why I am qualified for this job." Or is that supposition possibly mistaken? Is it possible there were ways of getting the word out you were actually good at something? There had to have been because David was quickly reocgnized is a capable young men. Paul, after the resurrection of Christ, could say to one of the churches, "You are our letter [of recommendation]". Clearly in ancient societies there were ways of having one's renown established.
If a person were particularly skilled they would rise to particular prominence. There is, after all, another proverb that says: Do you see a man skilled in his labor? He will serve before kings. He will not serve obscure men. So we know that people who are truly distinguished in their work rise to be distinguished in who they serve.
This is the part where I can't help thinking about Paul's admonition to assess yourself with sober judgment. The job I had until recently was a job I liked, mostly, but a job that I admit could sometimes have been more intellectually challenging and had me more active. God willing, I hope to have a more intellectually stimulating and active job when next I am able to work.
Now I wonder about the tension between the literal reading of the proverb and the principle that may be applied in one's job search in America these days. I've got nothing. I have no particular wisdom about this stuff. It sometimes seems as though Christians in America may say that the proverb applies to a culture that doesn't fit our time, much as evangelical Christians have said C. S. Lewis reflected his ignorance of the goods of capitalism when he pointed out that biblical Jewish laws about lending money at interest either forbid the practice outright (Deuteronomy) or place important restrictions on it (Exodus, Leviticus).
If we take the Torah as a narrative whole it becomes apparent that restrictions on lending at interest progressively become complete prohibition against lending at interest within the people of God (which got no mention by Driscoll during his unfortunately miserable Nehemiah series, where he said that lending money at interest was necessarily against the laws of those times, even though for a group attempting to return to Torah practice after coming back from exile Nehemiah could reasonably have been expected to freak out once he realized he and other prominent leaders among Israel were breaking the law of Moses by lending money at interest to their own people). In other words, popular pastors can sometimes find ways to skate over teachings in Scripture that indict someone in Scripture he implicitly cast himself as. Nehemiah's response was serious and took the relevant biblical texts seriously by his own account, which is at least what we can say about the author of that book in the scriptures.
My impression is that Christians today would say that a resume should be a good sales pitch for yourself, honest, but still a sales pitch.
I have plenty of time to wonder how this proverb about not praising yourself and letting another do it applies in job hunting. I suppose the most obvious application about be professional references. People want to be sold on your qualifications but they also want to know you're not making things up.
I have to admit that because of the kind of Christian I am I have NO IDEA how any Christian can take Proverbs 27:2 seriously and then go into marketing!
Ancient Jewish culture just doesn't come off like the kind of place where anyone wrote resumes saying, "This is why I am qualified for this job." Or is that supposition possibly mistaken? Is it possible there were ways of getting the word out you were actually good at something? There had to have been because David was quickly reocgnized is a capable young men. Paul, after the resurrection of Christ, could say to one of the churches, "You are our letter [of recommendation]". Clearly in ancient societies there were ways of having one's renown established.
If a person were particularly skilled they would rise to particular prominence. There is, after all, another proverb that says: Do you see a man skilled in his labor? He will serve before kings. He will not serve obscure men. So we know that people who are truly distinguished in their work rise to be distinguished in who they serve.
This is the part where I can't help thinking about Paul's admonition to assess yourself with sober judgment. The job I had until recently was a job I liked, mostly, but a job that I admit could sometimes have been more intellectually challenging and had me more active. God willing, I hope to have a more intellectually stimulating and active job when next I am able to work.
Now I wonder about the tension between the literal reading of the proverb and the principle that may be applied in one's job search in America these days. I've got nothing. I have no particular wisdom about this stuff. It sometimes seems as though Christians in America may say that the proverb applies to a culture that doesn't fit our time, much as evangelical Christians have said C. S. Lewis reflected his ignorance of the goods of capitalism when he pointed out that biblical Jewish laws about lending money at interest either forbid the practice outright (Deuteronomy) or place important restrictions on it (Exodus, Leviticus).
If we take the Torah as a narrative whole it becomes apparent that restrictions on lending at interest progressively become complete prohibition against lending at interest within the people of God (which got no mention by Driscoll during his unfortunately miserable Nehemiah series, where he said that lending money at interest was necessarily against the laws of those times, even though for a group attempting to return to Torah practice after coming back from exile Nehemiah could reasonably have been expected to freak out once he realized he and other prominent leaders among Israel were breaking the law of Moses by lending money at interest to their own people). In other words, popular pastors can sometimes find ways to skate over teachings in Scripture that indict someone in Scripture he implicitly cast himself as. Nehemiah's response was serious and took the relevant biblical texts seriously by his own account, which is at least what we can say about the author of that book in the scriptures.
My impression is that Christians today would say that a resume should be a good sales pitch for yourself, honest, but still a sales pitch.
I have plenty of time to wonder how this proverb about not praising yourself and letting another do it applies in job hunting. I suppose the most obvious application about be professional references. People want to be sold on your qualifications but they also want to know you're not making things up.
I have to admit that because of the kind of Christian I am I have NO IDEA how any Christian can take Proverbs 27:2 seriously and then go into marketing!
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
"Character is destiny"
If memory serves this aphoristic nugget was given to us by Heraclitus. To be sure I have not read the collected works of Heraclitus in literally a decade but his cryptic, aphoristic writing has a way of sticking to the inside of the brain the way peanut butter gets stuck in the mouth. His pithy statements tend to linger in the memory the way the smell of cilantro embeds itself into tupperware.
Both the Greeks and the Jews made much of character being one's destiny and the early Christians took this up, though with the caveat that in Christ one's character can be transformed. In this respect Christianity offers hope through Christ that as one's character is transformed by the work of the Spirit one's ultimate fate is changed. This is not to say that Jewish or Greco-Roman thought made no provision for a change of character. In fact the whole point of wisdom literature in any religious or secular tradition is to urge the reader to change their current path to something new.
Taking the axiom that character is destiny then would it be pertinent to propose that the more set in your ways you are the more certainly your destiny will unfold? This may be why the scriptures say that the stubborn man who stiffens his neck after many rebukes will suddenly be destroyed and be broken beyond repair. The proverbs also tell us that a selfish and unfriendly man isolates himself to seek his own desire and breaks out against all sound counsel. Those who are certain they are right beyond any doubt and those who are proud about it are setting themselves up for disaster. Both the Jews and the Greeks agreed on this.
I am getting just old enough now that, sadly, I may have seen people who have been stiff-necked in the face of persistent reproof and may be broken beyond repair. These sorts of people are convinced of their own rightness or greatness and that the real problem is outside themselves in the injustices of others. They can't look inside and see in themselves the propensity to the same kinds of sins they see in others. I don't go out of my way to discuss these things with them very often because I have observed, as far as I can, that they are stiff-necked people who refuse to listen. Letting them be broken by the application of their own wisdom may be all that I can do.
And for my part, who am I that I should suppose I can speak to someone else about their stubborn refusal to see reason? If I love someone enough I can suggest some dangers in the options they consider but in many cases that is taken as a sign of disloyalty or dishonor so it has been better to let people reap what they sow, often to their financial or personal detriment, than to attempt to reason with them once they have demonstrated that they won't receive suggestions, often after having made it clear they are open to telling me what I have to do based on their accumulated wisdom. Do you see someone who is wise in his or her own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for that person.
But the message of Christ is that now is the acceptable time of the Lord. We are invited to see who we truly are and not just who we pretend to ourselves we are, to repent of deceiving ourselves, and to follow Christ. In Christ, new creation. As we follow Him our character can change and be conformed to His likeness. Those who believe in this promise of the Lord and follow Him have an opportunity to change. Our changed character not only changes our destiny in this age but the age to come. Those who trust that they are just fine where they are and don't need to change may one day find themselves broken beyond repair. But Jesus, who can raise the dead, can be our hope even then. The Gospel is that Christ's character becomes our destiny because he bore the consequences of our character.
Both the Greeks and the Jews made much of character being one's destiny and the early Christians took this up, though with the caveat that in Christ one's character can be transformed. In this respect Christianity offers hope through Christ that as one's character is transformed by the work of the Spirit one's ultimate fate is changed. This is not to say that Jewish or Greco-Roman thought made no provision for a change of character. In fact the whole point of wisdom literature in any religious or secular tradition is to urge the reader to change their current path to something new.
Taking the axiom that character is destiny then would it be pertinent to propose that the more set in your ways you are the more certainly your destiny will unfold? This may be why the scriptures say that the stubborn man who stiffens his neck after many rebukes will suddenly be destroyed and be broken beyond repair. The proverbs also tell us that a selfish and unfriendly man isolates himself to seek his own desire and breaks out against all sound counsel. Those who are certain they are right beyond any doubt and those who are proud about it are setting themselves up for disaster. Both the Jews and the Greeks agreed on this.
I am getting just old enough now that, sadly, I may have seen people who have been stiff-necked in the face of persistent reproof and may be broken beyond repair. These sorts of people are convinced of their own rightness or greatness and that the real problem is outside themselves in the injustices of others. They can't look inside and see in themselves the propensity to the same kinds of sins they see in others. I don't go out of my way to discuss these things with them very often because I have observed, as far as I can, that they are stiff-necked people who refuse to listen. Letting them be broken by the application of their own wisdom may be all that I can do.
And for my part, who am I that I should suppose I can speak to someone else about their stubborn refusal to see reason? If I love someone enough I can suggest some dangers in the options they consider but in many cases that is taken as a sign of disloyalty or dishonor so it has been better to let people reap what they sow, often to their financial or personal detriment, than to attempt to reason with them once they have demonstrated that they won't receive suggestions, often after having made it clear they are open to telling me what I have to do based on their accumulated wisdom. Do you see someone who is wise in his or her own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for that person.
But the message of Christ is that now is the acceptable time of the Lord. We are invited to see who we truly are and not just who we pretend to ourselves we are, to repent of deceiving ourselves, and to follow Christ. In Christ, new creation. As we follow Him our character can change and be conformed to His likeness. Those who believe in this promise of the Lord and follow Him have an opportunity to change. Our changed character not only changes our destiny in this age but the age to come. Those who trust that they are just fine where they are and don't need to change may one day find themselves broken beyond repair. But Jesus, who can raise the dead, can be our hope even then. The Gospel is that Christ's character becomes our destiny because he bore the consequences of our character.
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