Leap ye Lame

The work down at PBN is, well, tiring.  You spend all day researching arcane types of knowledge - who built what church at what time?  Who owns what building now, and for how long?  What is the size of the congregation currently?  Droll stuff, certainly.

But it is within the droll stuff that humanity lives, breathes and has our being.  The sum total of florists in a city is wonderfully obscure, but it says much about what types of people prefer what types of flowers.  This in turn tells you about what people think about aesthetics.  And aesthetics is built on cultural assumptions and mega-trends that shape an entire epoch or civilization.

Which means that every day, when you buy gas at that gas station, or shop at that store, or eat at that restaurant, you are affecting a mega-trend.  Also, in a small way, you are throwing your tiny weight and changing civilization just a slight bit.  This is called bearing the Image of God.  It is being a fully participatory adult.

Art Festival

I strolled down to the Allentown Art Festival today.  Art Festivals aren't always my thing - lots of people, plenty of kitsch, pickpockets, annoying salesmen.  In fact, I usually go to watch the people.  People-watching is a pastime of mine, has been with me as long as I can remember.  You see the darndest things, sometimes, too.  Today, I saw:

A hideously burnt woman with barely healed skin in a very revealing dress.  Maybe the dress was necessary to prevent infection in her wounds, maybe she had been burnt for so long she was no longer self-conscious about it.  I really don't know.  But I would love to know how she got in that fire, why she survived, how she dealt with surviving. In short, I want to know her story.

There was also the poor college student who couldn't play guitar very well but was out with a hat and a guitar anyway.  I wonder - did he pick up guitar in order to play outside, or did he play outside in order to practice guitar?  Or is he an amazing virtuoso whose voice was damaged after a long weekend of rehearsal, and he was resting?  He wasn't bad, he was just simply very quiet and simplistic in his chord structures.

I also noticed that most fast food owners are rather large people.  I wonder, do they eat their own food?  There is something remarkably dangerous about eating your own poison (or delicacies, for that matter).  It gives one a god-delusion, I think, for I also noticed that the vast majority of them were loud, foul-mouthed and impatient.

Please don't take this post to be me criticizing the world for my own amusement.  There is some of that, true.  There is also something else going on.

All of those people were beautiful.

Sure, they were burnt, or not particularly musical, or fat and foul.  But they were images of a far-distant Creator.  They were our kindred.  Taken in the aggregate, humanity is overwhelming.  Taken in the individual, each person is a work of art from God Himself.  There was artwork all around me, but little of it was for sale.

Or are we?

Some of us may think we're kitsch, valuable only because of the whims of others.  Others of us don't see how we are like art at all, because we think we are so worthless.  But the truth is that worth is not something measured by the crowds, or the experts, or even the other people in our lives.  It is not something learned about in books, seen on TV, or even the result of comparative analysis with the rest of humanity.

The Mona Lisa would be great art even if it was hiding in a dim corner of a dilapidated bar in Patagonia.  Picasso was art before anyone discovered him.  And each person is precious because our lives were painted by the Master Painter.  Don't fit in?  You're probably the beginning of a new movement by the Master Painter.  Feel like no one takes you seriously?  Yeah, that was Van Gogh's problem.

Wow, I've wound up with God again.  This is why it is unwise to leave me alone for two hours at an arts festival.

Glory and Ashes

There are some times in life when we must throw back our heads and howl to the winds, "why??????"  The diagnosis comes in, the job market dries up, the friend calls with awful news, and suddenly you are knocked on your knees.  It's like a hurricane came barrelling through life, raining on everything, whipping up the hot air, and you're headed for the hills while throwing plywood over everything.  We demand answers of the universe, and the universe refuses to answer.

Then people show up with their comfort.  "Oh," they say, "isn't it great that all things work together for the glory of God?"  Yes, of course it is, but why did He have to glorify Himself with my friend, my sibling, my child?  "What is God trying to teach us?"  How to pop hot air balloons.  "Just cheer up, it'll get better."  Well, yeah, but not right now!

But brace yourself up, like a man, if you still can!  Can you raise leviathan?  Can you put hooks in his jaw?  Of course not, he is too large.  God is the Eye of the Storm, and in Him alone is comfort.  He is the Truth beyond Learning, the Glorious One who is coming to reign.  Behold He comes, and in His train come Justice and Mercy, Punishment and Compassion, the things this world needs.  Every rapist will be given their due, every murderer will feel the sting of death, every oppressor will feel the rectifying power of God.  That alone is our hope of salvation.

Summer

I lied.  That was not the last post.  This is.  I am coming back for the summer, to work with more historic churches.

BUT...first...I visited Houghton.  And saw friends.  You know what?  Friends are awesome.

AND...before that...I was home.  For three weeks.  Which was the awesomest awesomeness since they invented sour cream and onion potato chips.

Time to wax eloquent.  I've been pondering why communal worship is so meaningful to so many people (including me).  I know some of it has to do with feeling like part of a group, of belonging.  Part of it is worshipping.  Part of it is the beauty of communal worship (even that deaf fellow with the tin ear in pew three).

However, it seems there is something deeper and more meaningful.  In fact, I have come to believe there is something, related perhaps to Jesus' words about "let them be one as we are One," that connects us in communal worship.  It is something deep, so deep that we lose ourselves (for awhile) in the immanence of other human beings. 

And this feeling is all the deeper and stronger when it is felt with God.  There is nothing like the Oneness with God, which we find only in worship and which no one who has tasted of it has ever forgotten.  Even those who wander away from the faith remember and long to sense God near.  They convince themselves that they felt nothing but chemical washes, but they were experiencing Another.

This summer, I seek God.  Historic churches, friends, family, books, Latin (I'm teaching myself), a novel that must be written all seem so important.  But my priority is to sense again and again and again the nearness of God and His worshippers.