The Dust God: an Ash Wednesday Poem

a poem I’ve been working on every now and then for the past year or so…never quite satisfied but here it is so far:

 

The Dust God

HKS

His breath lingered over formless depths

not yet settled amidst shapelessness

suspended, poised above void

Darkness.

 

And then a

                 word

carried by breath as water—currents

Breath’s waves producing sound never heard:

“Be!”

 

“Be!” begins

erecting first sights

defining matter’s bounds

Heaven|Earth

 

“Be!” being

carried by breath

disrupting settled dust

lifting it to stand

forming it to hear,

“Be!”

 

Dust, tossed about

Becomes the rise and fall,

the ebb and flow of a swelling chest

Its formlessness takes shape

It’s shape, souled.

 

Dust’s lips form words for its breath to carry

Dust is be-ing

Dust is speaking

 

                             Names

genus and species released

from rib-caged captivity.

 

Dust builds,

Dust sings,

Dust feels

and tastes creation and creating

Dust’s own breath lingers over its creations

Dust’s own words rapture their attention

 

Infatuated by its own mouth’s mist

As it falls on lower beasts,

Dust files the old word among other words

in volumes filled to show Dust’s depth.

 

And in its filing, Dust forgot.

Ignorant of speech

Helpless to breathe

Defunct breath for deflated lungs

Vapid words unfit for a single void

 

And so, the forming form returned to formlessness

Becoming the very earth once pinned down by Dust’s feet

Subsumed, another patch of exploited land,

Dust returned to dust again

 

for without word, all words fall

 

                                                  Amidst the dust

“Be!” became

Dust for Dust

—divine endustment.

True breath breathing gaseous filth

True word projects from dirt-caked lungs

 

Til word was hoisted to the air, and

“Be!” became a nothing hung by a nail

 

Dust God?

No

dust man?

No

    dust alone as all began

 

Brought down from the heights to settle as sand

settles when thrown by the wind.

But the wind would not settle to have him stay down

Swept up by the Father, Dust stood encrowned

 

Dust God was shown to be dust man

“Be!” was shown to be

 

“I Am.”

Post-Valentine’s Day Poem

Concrete Balcony

If God is always everywhere, what’s so special about his presence in holy situations?

Continuing my reflections on Gerald O’Collins’s Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study. This chapter is entitled, “The Resurrection”.

Secondary and Divine Causality in Relation to Divine Presence.

O’Collins’s gave an interesting, and I believe correct, elucidation concerning causal ties. He recognizes, mentioning the legacy of Hume, the difficulty in establishing causal relations, though O’Collins believes the difficulty is overestimated. In order to purport that divine causes can be attributed to effects, O’Collins distinguishes divine causes from secondary causes. O’Collins claims the secondary causes of the spatial/temporal cosmos are ontologically different than God’s intimate yet non-intrinsic relation to space and time. Against deistic tendencies to claim God as the first cause setting the cosmos into motion and then detaching himself, even with God setting all things in motion, the secondary causes do not possess being without the continued support of God. Contrary to the absolute autonomy of God, this dependency implies a relative autonomy attributable to secondary causes.

The distinction between divine and secondary causality is especially regarding how we can think of holy situations. Traditionally, the presence of God in holy situations (e.g., the sacraments) is viewed as being more significant than the ordinary presence of God in the rest of the world. While God is present in the rest of the world as sustainer and primary cause, the divine presence experienced in holy situations is markedly different. In such situations God supersedes his roles as sustainer and primary cause, uniquely revealing his freedom apart from space, time, and natural law all the while maintaining his intimate relationship with it. In these holy situations, experienced within time and space, we experience the effects of a divine causality existing both apart from and within time.

To conclude, O’Collins made one more point that is especially clarifying. He notes that it is easier to talk about effects than causes, because we see effects but causes tend to be shrouded in mystery. Concerning the resurrection, he says that in faith those who saw the resurrected Jesus knew the cause, the resurrecting power of God, but unlike the effect, that cause remained shrouded in mystery (p.111). They did not see Jesus being raised from the dead, that was masked by the stone rolled over his tomb, they ascribe divine causality because that is the only explanation for an event contrary to nature. However, such divine causality intrinsically does not and cannot give proof (i.e., it cannot be empirically tested). To give proof of him being raised would mean that the risen Jesus was not a divine act, because the process would have simply been an undiscovered process within space, time, and natural law. Rather, divine causality, whether in the resurrection or the sacraments, is and can only be affirmed in faith.

Did Jesus know all he was getting into?

I’m reading through Gerald O’Collins’s Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study. I’ll post some reflections as I go. This reflection is on the chapter, “The Human History”.

“Fully” Knowing

            Towards the beginning of the chapter O’Collins gives a preliminary framework of how he views knowledge. For him, knowledge can never be grasped in purely objective ways, there is no “view from nowhere” or un-touched facts, so to speak. Rather, all facts are obtained via interpretation; this interpretation relies on the action of an interpreter. In other words, the apprehension of knowledge is integrally reliant upon experiential participation in the act of interpretation. For example, O’Collins delineates the difference between knowing about a person and knowing a person. To say you know a person necessitates having an involvement with that person whereas knowing about a person is merely an interpretation of facts from a distance. This means that any attempt at finding a distilled, invariant Jesus within the gospels will be frustrated by the ulterior aims of the authors. Ultimately, the evangelists’ portraits of Jesus were aimed at communicating Jesus as he is experienced, meaning they were considered with the reader knowing the person Jesus above simply knowing about Jesus (Though, of course, to know a person includes a measure of knowing about a person).

I think this preliminary assertion concerning knowledge provides an apt approach for O’Collins’s later discussion, not on the knowledge the gospel writers were concerned with, but the prior knowledge Jesus had concerning the severity and significance of his death. The assertion that Jesus did not have complete knowledge raises grave concerns for many concerning Jesus’s full divinity and therefore omniscience. Such a concern explains why O’Collins’s conclusion that Jesus went “willingly and to some extent ‘knowingly’ to his death” (p.69, emphasis added) may face immediate and perhaps violent demurral. The contentious aspect of this statement, as the italics highlight, is that Jesus may not have known fully, but only to some extent, what he would suffer. Rather than rushing to clench our fists and prepare for an Arian-Nicholas type showdown, I think that, when charitably and seriously considered, O’Collins view highlights deep, ontological truth about the Incarnation that may be overlooked by certain fixations on sacred categories such as omniscience. Here, I’m not so concerned with the category of omniscience as it relates to God. I am more interested in what O’Collins’s differentiation between knowing about and knowing experientially might contribute to a human knowledge that includes knowledge of the body via the impressions upon the flesh rather than an abstract divine knowledge.[1] If Jesus was human, we could potentially affirm that Jesus knew everything about the severity and significance of his death and still maintain that he did not know the severity and significance fully. Such a full knowledge, in the human sense of knowledge apprehension, would require participation with death and being raised. In other words, until he had experienced the severity of the Passion’s trial, torture, and death, he could only know about these things, but not in the fullness that concerns human knowledge.

Likewise, Jesus’ knowledge of the significance of his death could not be fully understood until after his experience with death and glorification. His experience in a resurrected body is an experience he may have known about but could not know fully until actually attaining a glorified embodiment. It seems that this resurrected body would include a new flesh-experience and consequently a new mode of perception not privy to the pre-resurrected.

As I think through this, I have two new questions: (1) what does a divine knowledge look like if it encompasses human knowledge; is such an experiential knowledge possessed by God solely because of the Incarnation or has such an experience always been within the Godhead. Or maybe it’s both because the Son has always been the one who does (the one who experiences) as is the case in the Trinitarian view of the Father decreeing, the Son doing, and the Holy Spirit enabling the doing. But still, how does this ‘doing’ relate to the unique knowledge via embodiment? I think Jenson has a view, if I recall, about the accomplishments of Christ being valid before we see them happen in history because Christ is the one whose promises are certain, and therefore, his promises are effective even before we see them effected.

My second question (to play around with categories) is, if experience is so integral to knowledge and we consider God omniscient, what would/could it look like for God to be omnisentient? I’m somewhat hesitant to do anymore with that than pose the question.

[1] which may just be our attempt at a propositional-type of knowledge

photo: Crucifix in Prague, soundpattern.wordpress.com

Seasons of Grief

Here’s a short devotion I wrote that was used for Beeson’s weekly newsletter sent out this Monday. 

Seasons of Grief

Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. 34 And he said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept. John 11:32-35, ESV 

“Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” Ps 30:5

I don’t understand the replacement of funerals for celebration services. I don’t get why tears are repressed for hollow laughter or why the depths of grief are forsaken for shallow conviviality. It’s as if our sitting in pain and suffering precludes our joy in coming resurrection. But, in this pericope, resurrection is right around the corner with Jesus being the one with the keys to suffering’s end; and yet, Jesus chooses to forego the immediate comfort of raising Lazarus and instead stops and weeps. That Jesus would stop to weep means there is a significance in being truly present in your pain that shouldn’t be overlooked.

You may think that pain is something to triumph over as quickly as possible. But consider this: Lazarus was raised in an instant, but his dying and death spanned days if not months with Mary grieving at his side. One might think that Jesus was cruel to allow Mary to suffer like this, but this length of time allowed her to stretch her legs, look around, and become deeply aware of the cavernous void that death had brought into her world. As the reality of death set further and further in; as she realized more fully the loss she had incurred, imagine the time-stilling intensity that rushed over her upon hearing the words, “Lazarus, come out!”

Seasons of grief reveal more fully the emptiness of the world that needs filling and, consequently, how great the thing must be that will fill it. Our sitting in pain and suffering does not preclude our joy in coming resurrection; rather, as the night of weeping tarries longer, the Sun’s breaking the horizon becomes all the brighter to our dry, red eyes.

Wilderness and Action: Henry Bugbee Jr., Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gordon Fee

As I go through some of my journal entries while working on my thesis, I’m going to be posting a few of them that won’t be involved in it but seem appropriate to share. Here’s my first journal entry:

Wilderness and Action (March 9, 2016)

Bugbee has been speaking about being open to the imperatives situations elicit: about knowing the ‘right thing’ to do in a given situation because of one’s openness to understanding what necessities present themselves. I’m reminded of Samuel Well’s talk of the Christian life being one of improvisation. The Christian has the theme and plot, perhaps even the sketch of the character’s direction. As Merleau-Ponty discusses the self as being what it is becoming, the direction of a character is that which the character is to aim to be (consider the φρονέω ‘mindedness’ or direction towards the humility of Christ (Phil 2:1-11) Paul encourages Christians to keep in the forefront of their mind as they are in the world as one type of character sketch). There is, in improvisation, a freedom of individuality within the limitations of the play itself. This is much the same as Merleau-Ponty would say of freedom: there is freedom in the situation but not in the context that one and others bring to the situation. One can be free to choose; however, the ‘sediments’ of prior choices or the effects of the choices of others remain on the body, just as an actor brings his prior knowledge and experience to the play/character. The sediments that our on the body may contribute to a leaning towards a particular decision; however, in every situation there is freedom to choose. To choose the right thing would be to have an openness to the world as Bugbee is talking about. Bugbee is ambiguous to me so far on how the necessity is elicited or what elicits it, perhaps it’s his moving away from Christianity and embracing Eastern mysticisms; however, without creating a stop-gap God, but embracing that God is found in the natural and it is capable to live with or without acknowledgment of his existence as Bonhoeffer has argued, I think the necessity of a situation, perhaps for the Christian or nonchristian, is guided by the Spirit. That the one who proceeds and constitutes relations would constitute human relations to situations I do not think is far-fetched, it simply embraces an expanse of common grace. Where the Christian life excels is in the recognition of the Spirit’s working, being able to recognize the voice of God (what I take to be the Spirit’s revealing the word-Son who is the character we are minded towards: the image we image). In knowing the voice of God, one knows and has an openness to the necessities elicited in a situation as revealed by the Spirit’s revelation of the image of the Father: the Word and Son of God.

This seems right in considering certain difficult passages, as Abraham’s offering of Isaac or David’s breaking of Sabbath. It seems that the law for both was not that which bound them, but that which they were free to pick up and lay down as the need arose. Granted, when the need to lay down the law arose there was no justification[1] for their actions, but justification would come in hindsight.[2] In considering their responses to situations and their considered righteousness in hindsight as shown in the Scriptures, it seems that the reason for their action was an habituation for acting in accordance with the voice of God, who does not act outside of his given word, but can act in light of the coming fulfillment of the word despite the current knowledge of the one acting. The voice of God, if not clearly seen yet, is not to be confused with the text of Scripture. The voice of God is the event of the Spirit revealing the image and offering up the freedom of the person to choose to be conformed to the image revealed. In their living by faith, Abraham and David acted, not out of current knowledge of a revealed Torah, but out of a revealed image of that which they were to be conformed to and; therefore, that which would show them to be justified within the span of redemptive history. They knew the voice of God because they had formed themselves to listening to it and responding to the necessity (opportunity for conformation) that was given to them. Though the scriptures do not contradict the Godhead’s action, the given word among the people was not necessarily all that it would be. Abraham and David were, in faith, living out the fullness of the word before it had been fulfilled (was being shown in its fullness).

Does this mean that the Christian acts outside of the word as displayed in its current light, if the voice of God is leading them? Abraham and David were acting in light of the word to be fulfilled, but today Christians act out a word fulfilled so it may seem to be that there are no longer situations in which Christians may need to act without justification since, in its fullness, there would be no need to act without being able to give reasonable justification from the scripture for the appropriateness of one’s actions. However, in light of the tension of walking in a land that is to be made new but is as of now engaged in war with darkness, it seems that the attempted escape of Christians from the mystery of walking through the wilderness of Canaan abandons the voice of God (the working of the Spirit revealing the Word of the Father) with a stagnant text. As Gordon Fee has said concerning Israel, the mark of the people of God was not Torah; it was the presence of God. This presence is a continual presence. In Israel the given word was coming to fulfillment thus some actions were committed in light of (though perhaps not consciously recognized as such) that which would be fulfilled. Today, the word is fulfilled (made full) in Christ, but there is a sense in which, because the return of Christ has not happened, the given word is fulfilled but the events of the word have not reached eschatological consummation and thus, if it is within the character of the voice of God to come to people acting beyond present events in light of future consummation, that the voice of God may call for some to act in spite of their own subjective knowledge of the fulfilled word and for them to be shown as justified as all is revealed (including all bad theologies) at the Day of the Lord. Thus, the voice of God may call for action beyond current understanding of scripture but in light of the truth of that fullness which will be shown in clarity at the eschatological consummation; consequently, the Spirit may provide the necessity of a situation as a necessity that will be committed without immediate justification, but in light of the justification of that action to be shown as the Spirit leads into all truth, showing the church how the fullness of the text is full and not merely that the text is full.

[1] Not justification in the soteriological sense, but in their ability to give sufficient reason for their actions.

[2] See Fear and Trembling

Poems and Short Stories

If you haven’t heard, I have had two poems and a short story published by my friends at Ant Farm Journal. You can find my poem “As Circles Gather” in Issue 4: The Summer Issue and my poem “The Pond is Freezing” as well as a short story I wrote for my niece entitled “Evalyn and the Book Shelf” in Issue 6: The Winter Issue.

http://www.antfarmmobile.com/

 

Resting in the Ashes

“From dust you were created and to dust you will return” were the words of the minister as he spread the ash of last year’s Easter Palm branches into the shape of the cross on the congregants’ foreheads. I was waiting towards the end of the line, having hesitated going up to receive the sign. I was the one who burned the branches and felt that I had already been sufficiently covered in ash prior to the service. My life, for that matter, had been sufficiently covered in ashes. You could say, as of late, life seemed to have been lived in the ashes. Had the minister not said that receiving the sign of the cross symbolized a dependency on God I would not have budged, but he did, so I did.

Typically, Ash Wednesday is viewed as somber. A time to look at our selfish striving and the vanity of our achievements. It’s a time used to reveal all the things that we are attached to: all the things that keep our focus. We give up certain things of pleasure so that our pleasure for worldly things will be directed towards a pleasure in eternal things; that our groans for earthly food will be met with spiritual food. These things are all good things, and they have their place, but they did not have a place for me at the time. When you are dwelling in the ashes all that can be seen is the cross. What can be taken away from a man undone? So as I walked to receive the sign, the painful and cathartic sting that the words “from dust…to dust” evoke for many became, for a moment, a time of rest. I am but dust, and thank God I will one day return. Thank God for the rest that I can take in my own death. For in my death will be the end of bitter hearts, the terms adultery, murder, and pride will be unknown, stress will find no stomach to pain, and racial hatred will be as waste in the mouth of its speaker. My death is the finishing of a race and the beginning of rest until the Son descends and, as one theologian writes, sets creation to its rights.

Living in the Ashes one can only see the cross and thus, one can only rest in the death of the Son, and in resting in the Son’s death, one learns to rest in one’s own death. From dust you were created and to dust you will return to the praise of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The No-God

Barth speaking just as loudly to the present time as he did for pre-World War II, yet heeded just as little.

“We suppose that we know what we are saying when we say ‘God’. We assign to him the highest place in our world:and in so doing we place him fundamentally on one line with ourselves and with things. We assume that He needs something: and so we assume that we are able to arrange our relationship to him as we arrange our other relationships. We press ourselves into proximity with Him: and so, all unthinking, we make Him nigh unto ourselves. We allow ourselves an ordinary communication with Him, we permit ourselves to reckon with Him as though this were not extraordinary behavior on our part. We dare to deck ourselves out as His companions, patrons, advisers, and commissioners. We confound time with eternity. This is the ungodliness of our relation to God. And our relation to God is unrighteous. Secretly we are ourselves the masters in this relationship. We are not concerned with God, but with our own requirements, to which God must adjust himself. Our arrogance demands that, in addition to everything else, some super-world should also be known and accessible to us. Our conduct calls for some deeper sanction, some approbation and remuneration from another world. Our well-regulated, pleasurable life longs for some hours of devotion, some prolongation into infinity. And so when we set God upon the throne of the world, we mean by God ourselves. In ‘believing’ on Him, we justify, enjoy, and adore ourselves. Our devotion consists in a solemn affirmation of ourselves and of the world and in a pious setting aside of the contradiction. Under the banners of humility and emotion we rise in rebellion against God. We confound time with eternity. That is our unrighteousness,—Such is our relation to God apart from and without Christ, on this side of the resurrection, and before we are called to order, God himself is not acknowledged as God and what is called ‘God’ is in fact Man. By living to ourselves, we serve the ‘No-God’…” Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, p.44

Library vs. Baby

Call it a sign of sanctification when you meet a baby’s incessant babbling in an otherwise silent library with a smile and not a cringe. “Let the children come to me,” our Lord says, and so should we remember when their yells and laughs break into our stuffy, adult sanctuaries attended by our boring, calloused hearts.
Perhaps the lady a few feet over, complaining to the receptionist; “Gone are the days when libraries were quiet!” will stumble across this…perhaps next time, when I react the same way she does, or in a few moments when the novelty of the child’s voice fades, I’ll remember what I’ve written.
I say this at the risk of being the Pharisee who said “God, thank you I’m not like other people–robbers, evil doers, and adulterers–or even like this little old lady,” but I say it at the expense of maintaining my false humility to show there’s a constant ebb and flow between our responses to tense moments. In one moment we are the little old lady who could use an Advil, and in the next we are people reminded that the kingdom of God is for the childlike. By God’s grace there steadily becomes a little less ebb and a little more flow. This time it flowed, next time remains suspect.