Welcome! You have accidentally reached the blog of a heteroclite follower of Jesus: dave wainscott. I'm
"pushing toward the unobvious" as I post thinkings/linkings
re: Scripture, church and culture. Hot topics include: temple tantrums, time travel, sexuality/spirituality, U2kklesia, role of the pastor, God-haunted music/art..and subversive videos like these.
Now, he's made it clear that this belongs to the secular/vocational realm as well:
Piper says is okay because she (female engineer)’s not personally giving directives to any man in particular. However, he warns that other scenarios– those where a woman must give direct instructions to a male– would violate their sense of manhood and womanhood. link
I
ask the Lord that he gives us all the grace to strip ourselves.” - See
more at:
http://davewainscott.blogspot.com/2013/10/pope-francis-almost-goes-naked-in.html#sthash.ih0T80pt.dpuf
I ask the Lord that he gives us all the grace to strip ourselves.” link - See more at: http://davewainscott.blogspot.com/2013/10/pope-francis-almost-goes-naked-in.html#sthash.ih0T80pt.dpuf
I ask the Lord that he gives us all the grace to strip ourselves.” - Pope Francis "If you pray..then when you pray... pray naked." -Mike Roe (lyics) "Barbara Brown Taylor suggests praying before a mirror, naked..She says this candidly, acknowledging that more readers will follow her suggestion in principle than in practice." -Christianity Today "Eros will have naked bodies: Friendship naked personalities". - C. S.Lewis
Yes, this is real shower curtain for sale, See the rest here.
It seems I am only able to pray naked while in Latin America. (Not that I have tried it much on my home continent, but that's already TMI. Here's a pic to click, I promise it's safe) (:
Being in a 'suicide shower' in Paraguay helps facilitate such prayer times.
So does being locked in the bathroom in Peru.
Those are two stories...with one point:
We're always spiritually naked anyway, so we
might as well pray as if we were literally so.
--------------
b)On a more serious note. here's John Beddington:
When I was in seminary, some friends of mine designed a new t-shirt. They took the surfing phrase, “surf naked,” and changed it just a little. The new seminary t-shirt had the seminary logo, looking very stately and conservative, and then there under it in small, neat letters, it said very simply, “Pray naked.”The t-shirt did its job of getting everyone’s attention, but it also conveyed a deeper reminder: that it is when we are naked, when we are vulnerable, when we are powerless, when we are out of strength and out of options and out of ideas--- that’s when God has room to work. That’s when God moves in and takes over and shakes things up. That’s when God comes closest. That’s when God can begin to shape us, to lead us, and to make us into miracles. link
I'm sure there are some too self-conscious to pray in the restroom, let alone while actively using the toilet. For you, I recommend an experiment with this vintage Jewish prayer from the Babylonian Talmud; noting the delightful double meaning of 'throne':
"Blessed is he who has formed man in wisdom in wisdom and created in him many orifices and cavities. It is fully known before the Throne of Thy glory that if one of them should be improperly opened or one of them closed it would be impossible for a man to stand before Thee." -link
And for those a bit concerned about the validity and veracity of praying naked in any context (including the sex context), do check out the stories of Isaiah,
St Francis and John White..
for starters. Your reading may reasonably be soundtracked by the 77s "not ready for church" (though we once danced to it...clothed...at a mens retreat) song, "Pray Naked"
....clothing optional.ing
First story is posted below; it's an excerpt from a devotional of mine on the U2 (ish) song "Falling at Your Feet" in which I retell the story
Blessed
is he who has formed man in wisdom in wisdom and created in him many
orifices and cavities. Is is fully know before the Throne of Thy glory
that if one of them should be improperly opened or one of them closed it
would be impossible for a man to stand before Thee." - See more at:
http://davewainscott.blogspot.com/2008/05/god-in-bathroom.html#sthash.uVrymzRH.dpufI was once locked in a bathroom shower in Peru, wearing nothing but my shock when I realized I was locked in, and no one was around to help.
......Suffice to say I was tired when Ken Metz picked me up in Lima something like seven hours later than scheduled.
And by the time we got to the bed-and-breakfast, even though I took the time to meet Jeff and Brenda in the kitchen, I agreed with Ken that I should get some rest in the room. He promised they would leave me alone untile they heard from me.
Soon I feared those words.
I couldn't sleep, so I figured I'd take a shower, and head downstairs to see what the gang was doing.
I got out of the shower, and noticed the bathroom door had swung shut.
And no matter how hard I tried, I could not pry it open.
I assumed it was just temporarily waterlogged, so I waited a few minutes,
It wouldn't budge.
I could always pry the hinges off..
If they weren't on the others side of the door!
I reached for my phone, to call Ken....and found that for the first time maybe ever, I didn't have my phone in the bathroom.
I reached for my clothes, ....and found that for the first time maybe ever, I didn't have my clothes in the bathroom.
The door was still not moving.
I glanced up at the window, where at least I could call for help...or climb out...in a towel!
The window was far too small to climb out (thank God), and no one was around in the alley (blame; I mean thank God.)
It was then i remembered Ken's kindly promise to leave me alone forever!
(all fall down) how might i be still
I still don't remember how long it took; it felt like hours, and might have even been one, before I tried the door one last time and it opened Houdini-style.
But somehow, and sovereignly, I was given grace in that interim stretch of time to not freak out; but to trust that I had received teh gift of an unscheduled peaceful moment; a quiet time, if you will.
(all fall down) how to navigate (all fall down) how to simply be (all fall down) to know when to wait (all fall down) this plain simplicity (all fall down) in Whom shall i trust (all fall down) how might i be still (all fall down) teach me to surrender (all fall down) not my will, Thy will
And there in my towel, I fell down at Jesus' feet and trusted.
I think I even heard some female voices in the alley, but counterintuitively decided I wouldn't yell them down to recruit help. After all, I hadn't finished my devotions.
Such is often the story of my life: boxed in; trapped...naked and alone with no resources.
In a prison of my own making.
You see, the reason the door had slammed shut is this:
While in the shower, I heard a voice in the hallway outside the door, and maybe even heard a knock. I was a bit embarrassed about being in the shower; and I didn't want anyone to hear me, so I reached out and pushed the door closed.
Thus does my shame operate: it closes doors that are my salvation.
I quickly googled to see if anyone had had a simlilar experience, or if being locked in while naked was just a special gift of God for me. I found it seemed pretty rare (or rarely reported), but was just stuff of fiction. Check out this pic from a hotel in Kenya; it;s how the hotel staff left the door after someone else had been "stuck in a moment {they} can't get out of":
Second story...from Paraguay.
I have many stories from Paraguay..some have been told (here and here).. some probably won't be..
But here's one I glean from.
No, it's NOT the story I am seem telling the local Paraguayan kids in this photo.
I often received a mild shock while in the shower in Paraguay.
No, not the symbolic shock at seeing my unclean self in the shower: a literal shock which the shower gave me.
Sometimes I even encountered an eerie and anonymous blue electrical glow while in the shower there; it almost made me run out into the yard in the suit I got for my birthday, where several parishioners were hanging out ("Ohm hi pastor..good to..uh, see you!").
If you have ever showered in Latin America, you know about the "suicide showers." It would be easy to see them as a satanic strategy..but I came to see them as a Divine Gift. (Besides, satan didn't create Peter Gabriel, though that case has been made . And even if the devil is behind them, who is behind the devil? Ask Martin Luther) I mean, what else causes you to INVOLUNTARILY pray your heart out?
Wil explains:
Some areas of the world have particular things that define them, and although a good idea they are only found in one continent or region and nowhere else. This even applies to electrical appliances and for Central and South America one of the defining bathroom fixtures is the Suicide Shower. I was first told about them by some American friends in London who told me to watch out for a contraption that fits over the shower head and is plugged into the electric mains. Pretty scary until you get used to them, I was told.
The idea behind suicide showers is to provide hot water where the plumbing system does not run to a hot water boiler, which is the norm in most of tropical America. The water is heated inside the shower head and usually provides a constant and dependable stream of hot water. Getting the stream of water right is something of an art that comes with practice, if the water flow is low it will come out boiling hot, too high and it’s only lukewarm. Controlling the flow to the optimum level can take some time and in some hotels there are detailed instructions on the back of the bathroom door.
Of course the really scary thing about suicide showers is that they combine that lethal combination of water and electricity. They need a lot of power in order to work and so are wired straight into the mains; you know they are working because when you turn on the water all the lights go dim. Being South America you can buy one of these things in any hardware store and simply wire it up yourself using a few bits of insulation tape. Some of the bodge jobs I’ve seen have been truly terrifying, like you really feel you are taking your life in your hands. Do I really want to be clean that much? Sometimes when you turn the water up too quickly, an electric blue flash comes out of the side of the shower head and you really feel - this is it. One of the guide books says that they are perfectly safe as long as you don’t fiddle with them and I have only ever experienced a mild shock off one, so this does seem to be true. -Wil
Being shocked/shellshocked in the shower, and hearing a curse word and/or prayer leave my mouth even left me somewhat content that at least I knew who to call on in time of need (:
As our worship leader on the trip found out by leading music nakedly..
I only have one sermon, you know..
And Pastor(a) Alannis once preached it naked, too...
PS: A related "Latin American shower as spiritual formation story I found online:
The second time I showered outside, I asked again, “Are you sure no
one is in the house across the street?” “Yes, we’re sure,” came the
reply; “no one is at home now. And yes, the street is a cul-de-sac.” I
thought of a long-ago camping trip, when I’d chanced to change into my
bathing suit on a grassy hillock, with only a meadow for walls and the
sky for a roof. I felt free, the warm sunshine reflecting off my pale
skin, bathing me in warmth. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Nature” came to
mind: “Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air,
and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become
a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the
Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”
Unlike that moment in the grass, I was not standing on bare ground,
but on a wet tile floor. Maybe it was that solid floor that got in the
way, but I didn’t feel any particles of God while standing in that
shower with a looming house across the street. I just felt spooked, and
it wasn’t the spooky feeling of holy dread or wonder, either. If’ I’d
wanted a religious experience, this was not the right place to find one.
The third time I showered, I still didn’t feel like a transparent
eyeball. I did try to relax. It helped to keep my back turned to the
house; that way I could pretend no one might be behind me — certainly no
not-so-transparent eyeballs that might chance to be in the vicinity. It
helped to look very carefully just at the beautiful tropical plants
surrounding two-thirds of the shower. Sunlight poured over them. Insects
buzzed in their branches, and the tanagers still perched there too,
their beady eyes still regarding me curiously. But when I turned further
around, which I had to do to get the conditioner out of my hair, I saw
the house and the street again. I knew full well that if there’d been
the smallest hint of a particle of God nearby (or even just a neighbor,
masquerading as the presence of the divine), I’d grab the nearest towel
and, with the water still on, throw it over myself with all the
convenience of a fig leaf.
After that final shower, as I retreated inside once again, it
occurred to me that religious experiences might be best left for more
fully-dressed occasions.
-Showering in Eden by Emily R Mace
---------------------------------------
Scholars have noted that this story appears to be modelled on a standard betrothal scene from Hebrew scripture, particularly that of Jacob in Genesis 29.[7] This convention, which would have been familiar to Jewish readers, is subverted by presenting Jesus as the Bridegroom of the Jewish people, following on from an earlier scene in which John the Baptist compares his relationship to Jesus with that of the friend of a bridegroom.[2]
In Eastern Orthodox tradition, the woman's name at the time of her meeting Jesus is unknown, though she was later christened "Photini". She is celebrated as a saint of renown. As further recounted in John 4:28-30 and John 4:39-42, she was quick to spread the news of her meeting with Jesus, and through this many came to believe in him. Her continuing witness is said to have brought so many to the Christian faith that she is described as "equal to the apostles". Eventually, having drawn the attention of Emperor Nero, she was brought before him to answer for her faith, suffering many tortures and dying a martyr after being thrown down a dry well. She is remembered on the Sunday four weeks after Pascha, which is known as "the Sunday of the Samaritan Woman".
In Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico, a celebration of the Samaritan woman takes place on the fourth Friday of Lent. The custom of the day involves churches, schools, and businesses giving away fruit drinks to passers-by.[10] link
But, you say, “It was at NBC.” Well, if something sounds crazy, check the URL. This particular story was on NBC.com.co.
Did you notice the extra .co on the end? That means it's not really NBC.com. Also, click around to the other stories, which literally have text that reads "adfasf weoogsdre gawerags."
You just make us all look gullible when you don’t do simple steps like that.
By the way, if you are a pastor you should already know that no one can make you officiate anything. In fact, you can refuse to officiate an interracial marriage. You'd be an idiot and a racist, but you wouldn't be arrested.
"It’s not gullibility; it’s malice. (C.S. Lewis is right and Ed Stetzer is wrong.)"
It has been “An Embarrassing Week for Christians Sharing Fake News,” Ed Stetzer writes for Christianity Today.* By “Christians,” Stetzer means the CT audience, which is to say white evangelicals. White evangelicals, he says, seem particularly susceptible to believing and spreading fake news stories because they are “gullible”:
So, here is the deal.
We are too gullible. …
You just make us all look gullible when you don’t do simple steps like that. …
Posting links to fake [news stories] just makes all of us look (rightly) gullible. …
Be less gullible next time.
That’s the gist of Stetzer’s entire post, which makes a commendable case against credulous gullibility and offers some practical advice for how to be more skeptical when evaluating outrageous-seeming news stories online.
--------------- 3)Rachel Held Evans: For the sake of the gospel, drop the persecution complex
d you hear about the pastor who was arrested for not marrying a same-sex couple? What about the publisher that got sued for refusing to censor anti-gay verses from the Bible?
Both of these stories have been exposed as fakes of course, but that didn’t keep hundreds of thousands of conservative Christians from sharing them online this week. When I pointed out to a friend that the story he had just shared on social media wasn’t true, he replied, “well it might as well be. Christians in this country are under attack.”
More recently, RS has suggested that Dave Matthews is
one of rock's most underrated Pretty Complex Dudes – as horny as Lil Wayne, as troubled as Thom Yorke, able to growl "war is the most vulgar madness" like the American Sting he's always sort of been. He's got a beige-Baja-shirt rep and a black-turtleneck soul. -link
Great point, since as Mr and Mrs David Dark have masterfully noted Yorke (and his Radiohead) are absolutely apoclayptic and "very resurrection." (Back to Zappa, Rolling Stone, in the link above, Joe’s Garage is Zappa’s Apocalypse Now.)
We apparently have the word “apocalypse“ all wrong. In its root meaning, it’s not about destruction or fortune telling; It’s about revealing; It’s what James Joyce calls an epiphany-the moment you realize your so-called love for the young lady, all your professions, all your dreams, and all your efforts to get her to notice you were the exercise of an unkind and obssesive vanity…The real world, within which you’ve lived and moved and had your being, has unveiled itself. It’s starting to come to you. You aren’t who you made yourself out to be. An apocalypsehas occurred, or a revelation, if you prefer…Apocalyptic maximizes the reality of human suffering and folly before daring a word of hope. The hope has nowhere else to happen but the valley of the shadow of death. Is it any surprise that we often won’t know it when we see it? -David Dark, “Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons and Other Pop Culture Icons”, p.10
One heteroclite has suggested/joked that half of Dave's songs are about God, and half are about sex...
....and maybe even the sexsongs are eventually Godsongs (or is it vice versa?)
Makes sense; as Rob Bell says in "Sex. God.,' "This is about that"
How do you hear/read/experience/interpret Dave Matthews?
Some deep meditations/prayers/laments about and to God (or "God as a symbol"):
Rob Bell clearly and publicly proclaimed, of the Eden fruit of Genesis 3:6 that..
"It was a watermelon" -Rob Bell, p, 186, "Sex.God."
There it is, flat out, unapologetically and without bothering with a defense or explanation.
No citing of scholars who have made that case.
Isn't it unbelievable that the heresy hunters haven't picked up on this, and crucified him for it?
Isn't it amazing that the phase "It was a watermelon" by Rob Bell only produces two Google returns, and both are simply from PDF versions of the book!?
Apparently, the interwebs have never talked about this until now. Once again, this humble blog (that I'm proud of) changes that as soon as I hit 'publish.'
Yes, granted it's a footnote. But doesn't anyone read footnotes?
Does no one besides Rob and meself know it's even there?
Photo evidence, footnote 62:
What do you think is up with this?
Is he kidding; does he believe it; is it a sly subversive bone thrown for the bloggers?
And no one blogging about it? (OK Later note: I found two reviews (Heathersy and Ordinary Visionary which briefly mention it. Surprisingly, neither spend much time on it. One wonders if it's a joke where they "missed the punchline" and the other...amazingly...assumes he meant it literally, and doesn't engage him)
Though the watermelon reference predates the "Love Wins" controversy, Rob has long had to deal with the heresy hunters. Did he bury this as a throwaway/ Easter Egg?
Note that Bell often saves some of his best material..and quips...for the footnotes.
Click one of the links above to read these footnote numbers:
81, 117, 156
And of course, #77..see below. It's about his claim that the original Hebrew for the female lover's quote in Song of Solomon was "I have a headache."
Also note a good book to help you "get" Rob Bell;
and this on "the agony of explanation."
Don't hear what he's not saying.
"Sex.God" is a good book.
( Qualifier: As Ben Witherington has noted, Bell..and Ray VanDerLaan, whom Bell draws from.. may sometimes jump too quickly on Jewish traditions sources that may or may not make his case)
No joke.
Sell some watermelons and buy it.
Or dare to read it via illegal PDFs above while they last...
I have often though, said and taught that this (the Myers-Briggs phenomenon Priebe talks about in the article I will link) happens, but not due to reading anyone else making a logical case for it, but because I intuitively felt that it did..,
I have often suggested that if each pair of preferences is a pictured as a spectrum,
imagine folks who are strong on one "end" looping around to act like their "opposite."
True also of fundamentalisms of the left and right..
You know, I sometimes picture the "line" as more of a mult-loopy helix (Hegelian?) helix..like this diagram of sex(uality) from the cover of Foucault's :"The History of Sexuality">>
I don't see anywhere in the book where this diagram is explicitly explained, but if Rob Bell is right..
For many, sexuality is simply what happens between two people involving physical pleasure. But that's only a small percentage of what sexuality is. Our sexuality is all the ways we strive to reconnect with our world, with each other, and with God." (Rob Bell, "Sex God," p. 42).
...it's inevitably also a picture of life. let alone our personality preferences.
In Myers-Briggs, it seems that when one person is E or I, not matter how far in one direction, their "vertedness" loops and weaves.
Or check out like Kegan's developmental chart, "a helix of evolutionary truces"
I can't help it. I just intuitively feel that life itself is a holy helix.
Anyway..the article, with an example: ------------------------------------------------------------ "How Each Myers-Briggs Type Contradicts Their Own Stereotype" by Heidi Priebe. Full article here
Excerpt about my type: ..because it's all about me! (:
INFP
Stereotype: INFPs are fragile emotional snowflakes who cannot deal with facts or hard logic.
Reality: Though INFPs certainly prefer using emotion over logic, they are more than capable of getting things done when they need to. This type can actually be incredibly resourceful and organized, as they will go to any lengths necessary in pursuit of what they believe is right. As a highly pensive type, INFPs are quite focused and often even mistype as judgers.
U2's road manager for 33 years, the amazing Dennis Sheehan died suddenly last night here in LA. Dennis was a calm and kind Christian man. The team is heartbroken so Adam, Larry, Edge, and Bono asked me to sharesome scripture, words of comfort, and pray with them right before they walked on stage tonight. After sharing the#ChooseJoystory from my son's death, I asked "So how do you go out and do a concert when your heart is hurting?" Bono said "We choose joy!" Right. Pray for Pam who lost the love of her life. link
That version of "choose joy" is not some "name-it, claim it" happy-clappy motto (Denial is not just a river in Egypt), but a hardwon naked trust in the endless love that is know only through the crucible of endless grief. That doesn't preclude anger..even yelling at life, grief, the grieved...and God.
"I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Comfort me, COMFORT ME, COMFORT ME!!!" -Bono at end of "Wolves." #RIPDennis#U2ieTour
Last night, at the end of "Raised by Wolves," itself a stunning public griefsong, Bono snippeted Psalm 23 in the outro (as usual), this time followed by "Comfort me. COMFORT ME, COMFORT ME!" (see video below). Psalm 22 and
23 are two sides of the same whole and holistic grieflove lamentjoyprayer (see"The Lord Be With You...Even When He’s Not!")
Peace of heart...finding love limitless in the midst of limanality and limitless grief is the only ways and means of knowing anything. Not to mention are only lens for knowing as we are known. ( By the way, we can know the Unknown Calle)r.
Note the last line of that excerpt of "California"-- "there is no end to love" ---is itself a clear nod to Paul's 1 Corinthian's 13 insistence that "love never ends."
But do check well the line before that, which has baffled me: "There's no end to grief. That's how I know there is no end to love."
This apparent nonsequitur and profound truth is also thoroughly Pauline. NT Wright has detected in Scripture, notably in Paul, an "epistemology of love."
He even suggests that it must inevitably worked out in art; specifically music...even more specifically "musical performance":
....Is this then a reinforcement, from a musical point of view, for Dorothy L. Sayers’ thesis in The Mind of the Maker, to which I referred earlier?Is there then indeed a Trinitarian pattern to the work of the artist or writer which, reflected back, provides some kind of evidence of who God may be?I am not sure that this thesis can be sustained by itself, or that a natural theology built up by that means without help from elsewhere would arrive at anything approximating to the God and Father of Jesus, the giver of the Spirit.But when the creative and aesthetic project meets the scriptural revelation — mediated, of course, through the thinking of the household of faith — then the two can perhaps at least be complementary.I have explored elsewhere what I have called ‘an epistemology of love’, in which the sterile opposition between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ reductions of ‘knowing’ are transcended. I think, and hope, that what Paul Spicer and I discovered in our work on the Oratorio was something like that: a love for the subject-matter, a love worked out in art and scholarship, through which we both learned and grew and grasped afresh some of the central matters of Christian faith. And if this is true it may be a pointer to something else - something which the whole Theology Through the Arts project is all about: the non-reducible, and not merely decorative, function of imagination within historical work (as Collingwood insisted) and also theological endeavour, as well as in musical composition and performance.
I realize that I have thus arrived, as a non-specialist, at more or less what Aquinas says in his famous formulation: ‘As grace does not destroy but perfects nature, it is right that natural reason should serve faith just as the natural loving tendency of the will serves charity.’There is of course a dangerous circularity about reaching that conclusion about method precisely by engaging in what, I hope, might be an instance of it happening in practice.But I think I have said enough to show that this is a fruitful area for further enquiry and experiment, especially if — though this would be a matter for specialists to enlighten me further — what Aquinas meant by ‘natural reason’ is a large enough category to embrace aesthetic and artistic integrity, the composer’s and conductor’s sense of ‘what works’.Certainly in this case the composer’s — and conductor’s — aesthetic and artistic integrity ‘served faith’ in a way that makes the ordinary jobbing theologian and preacher jealous.If all theology, all sermons, had to be set to music, our teaching and preaching would not only be more mellifluous; it might also approximate more closely to God’s truth, the truth revealed in and as the Word made flesh, crucified and risen.
Is this how the band got through the concert last night?
Is this how they get through every night?
I too have felt (well, maybe not; which is itself the problem) the deaths of a series of loved ones:
a cousin who was like a brother, dear friends from church...
and I have grieved not grieving.
And even though I have been weaning myself from the evangelical idol of certainty in recent years (and that is a grieving indeed)..
in recent weeks, thanks to U2's "California," and their healthy navigation of their own grieving, I have been learning and leaning into all that I need to know.
One of his best stories is Love in the Ruins. It is the first of two novels featuring the character Tom More, a fictional descendent of Sir Thomas More, “the man for all seasons” who, in the 16th century, was the Speaker of the House of Commons and the Lord Chancellor of England – and who refused to go along with Henry VIII’s desire for a divorce, so lost his head and his life. Percy’s More is a bad Catholic, a wandering husband who drinks too much, and a brilliant doctor. Written with a finger to the wind to the social turmoil of the 1960s, Percy wrote of Southern life embodied in the institutional frailties of the Love Clinic, a place where physicians and patients are thrown together in their hopes, longing to belong to someone somewhere.
Literally and metaphorically staggering his way through the story, More develops a machine that promises to save the day for the Love Clinic; he calls it “the qualitative/quantitative ontological lapsometer.” For anyone with ears to hear, attentive to the Enlightenment Project of the last few hundred years, Percy here captured the fundamental flaws of the modern world, fictional as they were in imagination and conception. When More is asked about the nature of a lapsometer, he replies – innocent as a dove, wise as a serpent – “It measures lapses – in the human soul.”
The dreams and debates of modernity, cascading as they are into postmodernity, are always at the heart of the human condition. It cannot be otherwise, as we are never more and never less than sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. So we take our place as folks who long to love and to be loved. Percy understood that with an unusual eye: historically, philosophically, psychologically, politically, and, yes, theologically, seeing the complexity for Everyman and Everywoman. We want love, yet we also know how hard it is to love and to be loved.
There’s the rub. To know and to love; to love and to know. Can both happen at the same time? Can we do both? Can we have both?
Most of the time it seems impossible. For reasons beyond the scope of this short essay, I would argue that human beings more often than not choose cynicism or stoicism as alternative accounts of life and of love. Rather than an epistemology of love, a way of knowing that is manifest in loving, we choose to protect our hearts, “knowing” with the poet Byron that “he who knows the most mourns the deepest.” To know is to despair. To know is to flounder. To know is to mourn. link
