Selections From Bonhoeffer

How could one person pray the prayer of the fellowship without being steadied and upheld in prayer by the fellowship itself? At this very point, every word of criticism must be transformed into fervent intercession and brotherly help. Otherwise, how easily might a fellowship be broken asunder right here!
The free prayer in the common devotion should be the prayer of the fellowship and not that of the individual who is praying. It is his responsibility to pray for the fellowship. So he will have to share the daily life of the fellowship; he must know the cares, the needs, the joys and thanksgivings, the petitions and hopes of the others. Their work and everything they bring with them must not be unknown to him. He prays as a brother amongst brothers. It will require practice and watchfulness, if he is not to confuse his own heart with the heart of the fellowship, if he is really to be guided solely by his responsibility to pray for the fellowship.
Life Together, pg 63

Be Wrong

I want to be successful. We all want to be successful. We have to be wrong. Take this on for size:

I had this experience a couple of years ago where I got to sit in on the editorial meeting at the Onion. Every Monday they have to come up with like 17 or 18 headlines, and to do that, they generate 600 headlines per week. I feel like that’s why it’s good: because they are willing to be wrong 583 times to be right 17.
Ira Glass

The Onion is a hands down success. Everyone recognizes their brilliance. They are wrong 583 times per week. And they know it. They relish in it. Being means they can be right. I have to remember that being wrong is part of being successful. If you are never wrong – how do you know you are right?

Technology Woes

I have to get this rant out. Explosion is imminent. First the lesser offender: Ticket: 13265. I absolutely love how Django rolled in their transaction support. Through the middleware setting, and the decorator. I think it is absolutely perfect from a design standpoint. I, however, lost a lot of hair today over its implementation. It hides perfectly good (read: the bad one you actually want) exceptions from you. I had no idea why it was failing. Turns out, of course, it is still my fault. But don’t hide it from me guys. Show me the error of my ways through the correct stack trace!

Update: Ticket: 6623 is out there (mine is a dupe). You can see no one has touched thing in over a year. It was originally slated for release 1.0. We’re on 1.2. I don’t want to tell you how this makes me feel.

This one is far, far worse. That means it has to do with IE (7 and 8, why bother checking 6. Honestly). And javascript. And form elements. Let yourself be warned. If you ever, at any time, try to manipulate the “checked” status of a radio button or checkbox and that node is not attached to the DOM at any point in its animated and exciting life that “checked” status you so desperately needed falls away into the ether. Thank you IE. Once again, thank you.

What is More Real?

What is more real? The words on the page or experiencing the words on the page?

“If that’s what he means,” says the student to the poetry teacher, “why doesn’t he just say it?” “If God is real,” says the parishioner to the preacher, “why doesn’t he simply storm into our lives and convince us?” The questions are vastly different in scale and relative importance, but their answers are similar. A poem, if it’s a real one, in some fundamental sense means no more and no less than the moment of its singular music and lightning insight; it is its own code to its own absolute and irreducible clarity. A god, if it’s a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it (though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive). Thus the uses and necessities of metaphor, which can flash us past our plodding resistance and habits into strange new truths. Thus the very practical effects of music, myth, image, which tease us not out of reality but deeper and more completely into it.
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/hive-of-nerves/

Don’t Want To Add

I would ruin it if I did add to it:

To say that Jesus rose from the dead is, among other things, to say that in spite of the fact that his love for us in obedience to his mission led to his death — or in fact because his love led to his death — he is still present to us, really present to us and loving us in his full bodily reality. It is not just that we remember him or imitate him, or that he lives on in a religious tradition. The good news is that he rose from the dead, that he went through real death to a new kind of bodily life with us. So that when we encounter someone who needs us, when we find the hungry and the imprisoned and the homeless, we can really say that here we encounter Christ, not in some metaphorical way, but literally. He personally is with us. The difference between having faith in the literal bodily resurrection of Jesus and not having such faith is, at one level, the difference between really discovering Jesus in the needy and oppressed, and simply thinking that it is a rather beautiful idea. It is the difference between really believing, like Abraham, that God asks the impossible of us, to find life through death, creation through destruction, that God makes the impossible possible for us, and not believing in God — thereby making him just some part of the machinery of our world.
[ HT: ID ]

300 words on Education

There is a 300-words-a-day project in which some great writers are participating. One on education caught my eye this morning:

As I was reading the paragraph, I could not help but notice the parallels between the state of education in Byzantium circa 775 and the US today. How many of our civil servants are truly wise, capable of understanding the law and applying it, understanding history’s role in shaping where we are today, and able to govern effectively? Furthermore, study after study shows that our population is getting less intelligent with every generation. What value does our education system put on philosophy, language, literature, the arts, and preserving the American culture? Scott Barstow

Now, I couldn’t care less about American culture. In my opinion, there are only a few things about it that are redeeming, the rest is mostly garbage. I do, however, lament his point about the education system. It is incredibly likely that I will not attempt to pursue (and therefore somewhat likely that finishing the MTS is a priority) a PhD because there is no where to use it.

More Mystery, More Enigma

I am coming to enjoy mystery and enigma which cannot be solved. They are tension, as such. Tension cannot be possessed, objectified, or codified by us. Tension can only be experienced, lived, related to and in.

In our time analytical knowledge is prized, taught, and sought after. This form of knowledge only works through possession. Hence this form of knowledge denies that contradiction exists. Contradiction cannot be known. This tension which cannot be possessed cannot be, and therefore is excluded from the realm.

Sadly we all are contradictions. We are all in tension. People cannot remain human and be possessed or objectified. When possessed, they become objects of analytical knowledge. They are no longer human. They become quantitative, not qualitative.

We can, however, know one another as humans: in contradiction and in tension. This is not analytical knowledge, but dialectical knowledge (perhaps even speculative knowledge). We are defined by our relations. We define ourself by our relationships. These create the tensions within us.

The analytical annihilation of mystery in our time has destroyed our faith in our ability to know in this other way. We are further from one another. And the deepest wish of analytics is to have everything objectified and possessed. This is harmful to us, as individuals and as a culture.

I need mystery, tension, and contradiction. I need to understand relationally. Only then can I find meaning. And meaning is why we are all here.

This is Why I Love Liturgy

A work, a performance, can be taken as worship – even as the Book of Common Prayer says we are unworthy to give it – because God meets us there:

Thesis 4: Christian worship does not lie in a realm outside of religion. To seek a direct correspondence between leitourgia (“the work of the people”) and divine action is to forget that worship itself is a “perpetual factory of idols” (Calvin). Furthermore, such easy correspondence risks fetishizing and instrumentalizing worship. The problem is structural and runs deep; in truth, the very discipline of “ecclesiology” is prone to idolatrous self-aggrandizement. Thus the critique of religio strikes at the very heart of Christian worship.[6] The occasion for sin occurs preeminently as leitourgia—the “work of the people” to self-justify, to strive to stand aright before God. Indeed, worship is the site marking our deepest estrangement from God. But this is not the final word! In Jesus Christ, God decisively wills to be God-for-us and so our idolatrous “work” becomes the site of our reconciliation with God. Reconciliation occurs not as exchange or production, but as a gratuitous event of grace. In this event the Spirit “takes up” our “work” to stand aright before God and transforms and transfigures our prideful attempts to “make a name for ourselves.” Our worship only becomes true praise, then, as our “work” loses track of itself under the great pressure of God’s own doxa. Such doxa happens as the event of God’s grace evokes gratitude “like the voice an echo.” Indeed, “Gratitude follows grace like thunder lightening” (Barth, CD IV/1, 41).
[HT: Inhabitatio Dei

How To Read

Justice David Souter is talking about how to read, interpret, and judge the Constitution. This, just as well, could have been writing about how to read the Scripture. Well done. Take into account the contradictory/opposing trajectories within meaning for you. I can’t even add anything to it. It is that good. Not a coincidence he is an Episcopalian. They understand these things.