Mystery

Mystery

Hidden things.

Joseph dreamed amazing dreams of a destiny too fantastic to believe.

Daniel used an uncanny gift to interpret the symbols of Kings' dreams; uncanny in his ability to interpret not just the dream but the dreamer.  

We're not comfortable with the unknowable, are we Linus?

Campy 1960's B-budget sci-fi flicks.  They tell on us.  At each new level of technological advancement and scientific breakthrough, we puff out our chests.  We think far too highly of our grasp of the universe and the macroverse and the microverse... In black and white, arrogant scientists in stylish suits makes boasts and blah blah blah in lecture hall style oration some developing theory now mocked among advanced scholarship.

But at the time...

I mean, it's science.

Theories.  Hypotheses.  Educated guesses.

Educated guesses never get it wrong, do they?

We're not comfortable with the unknowable.  

What we don't know, we just make up as we go.

Call it an educated guess.

I'm not mocking science.  I love science.  

I'm mocking me.  

Us.

As a philosopher and a theologian there is an uncomfortable proximity to mystery.

In dreams

In prophetic statements

In parables

we grope for the meaning of 

life

faith

suffering

wrestling with our own angels on the other side of the Jabbok; contending with the mysterious

to grasp with an iron grip

the revelation of God's present and future activity;

present and future purpose;

plans

Something in our hands we can't explain

like the way God is saving us, even now.

Afraid of what we don't understand many are afraid to open their hands.

Grace is terrifying.

Why I need God's grace is creepy-crawly.

Am I really that guy?  Deep down in the dark basement of my soul is the creeper capable of anything.

I don't claim him on my taxes but I know he's there.

Why God would gift grace to me is terrifying.

Unconditional love is always awkward.

Unexpected.

Strange.

What is God up to?

What will God do next?

What did God just put into my hands?  

Grace?

Best thing we can do, Linus, is pass it along.

Fast as we can.

But let me tell you something wonderful, a mystery I’ll probably never fully understand. We’re not all going to die—but we are all going to be changed. You hear a blast to end all blasts from a trumpet,and in the time that you look up and blink your eyes—it’s over. On signal from that trumpet from heaven, the dead will be up and out of their graves, beyond the reach of death, never to die again. At the same moment and in the same way, we’ll all be changed. In the resurrection scheme of things, this has to happen: everything perishable taken off the shelvesand replaced by the imperishable, this mortal replaced by the immortal. Then the saying will come true: Death swallowed by triumphant Life! Who got the last word, oh, Death? Oh, Death, who’s afraid ofyou now? It was sin that made death so frighteningand law-code guilt that gave sin its leverage, its destructive power. But now in a single victorious stroke of Life, all three—sin, guilt, death—are gone, the gift of our Master, Jesus Christ. 

Thank God! 

~ 1 Corinthians 15:51-57, The Message

Linus and Levar Burton

Levar Burton made reading fun but Linus made reading cool.

The patron saint of nerdy intellectualism, Linus can take the most excruciating human event, like say, a crush's devastating rejection, and put it behind plexiglass for objective observation!

Having raised $2 million dollars to bring Reading Rainbow back to production is its own story. But knowing that Burton raised the first million in only 11 hours reveals a cultural hunger that is for more than just an effort to excite children to read.  This is the power of story.  Burton lifted words from the page and brought them to life.  Reading was merely the skill that, if mastered, opened a multiverse of imagination and interpretation.  

No one else captured this with the ease and brilliance of Reading Rainbow.  Burton hosted each episode with a passion contagious with wonder.  We caught it.   

Face it.  Books are as close as we may ever get to reading one another's minds.  Fact is, books really are Telepathy.  Those written words transport someone else's passion across not just geography, but the distance of years, culture, politics and economics. Is it possible to see life through the eyes of a blind woman? The art of text mixed with the power of story takes us there when someone like Helen Keller practices the courage to write.  Without the reader, however, the experience is lost forever. 

This is where Linus comes in.  He is the patron saint of the avid reader whose thirst for knowledge and understanding is insatiable.  While others flaunt biceps, pecs and lats, Linus flexes his vocabulary, command of grammar and reading comprehension.  Telepathically, books translate our collective stories as we experience the farthest reaches of the territories called When and Where and How and Why.

Just when we think we have gone as far as we can go, another hungry caterpillar metamorphs before our eyes; another insistent mouse teaches us that cookies come to the persistent.  

Just when our library card is ready to expire and our lethargic minds are ready to let it go... another story stretches aglow across the horizons of a book's binding.  Each word is another step down a road not seen before; paved but not without danger; a path cleverly cleared yet not without mysteries. 

  

"Let's take a look. 

It's in a book.

A reading rainbow."

Jean Schulz's Blog: Comics and Reading (2013)
Reading Rainbow App for Kindle
Reading Rainbow App for iPad

Where does resolve come from?

Happy New Year, Charlie Brown (1986) (TV)

Linus van Pelt:
  When Leo Tolstoy was writing "War and Peace", his wife, Sonya, copied it for him seven times. And she did it by *candlelight*, *and* with a dip pen. And sometimes, she had to use a magnifying glass to make out what he had written. 


Charlie Brown:

  Linus, I really... 

Linus van Pelt:
  Had to do it after their child had been put to bed, and the servants had gone to their garrets, and it was quiet in the house. Just think, Charlie Brown: she wrote the book seven times with a dip pen. And you're telling me you can't even read it once?

Listen, Linus. I know what you’re doing. 
You want Charlie Brown to show some resolve. 
The assignment is overwhelming. 
The deadline is looming. 
You just want your friend to succeed. 


But you’re going about it all wrong. 


Sure, it’s the time of the year for resolutions and Charlie Brown needs to be resolute; to resolve that he will finish the monolithic tome. 


But, Linus, who has ever found the power to push the train uphill purely on inspiration juice pressed from the monumental suffering of others? 


If sacrifice and suffering impelled the race to greater feats, humanity would now be deified. Suffering saturates the air we breathe; it clogs news-feed arteries. 


Sacrificial dedication based on someone else’s sacrifice? It lacks oomph. 


Leo wrote the voluminous War and Peace because he believed it. 
Sonya copied it seven times because she believed in Leo. 
If Charlie Brown is going to read it through, even once, it will happen because Charlie Brown believes that he is worth more than the “lowest grade you can get without failing.” 


Resolve doesn't come from appreciating the enormity of another’s sacrifice. 

Resolve comes when you are ready to claim and defend and ever protect that which if washed away would erase you from the human schema.


This is a new kind of responsibility thinking: personal and communal.


Linus, what do you say you and I explore this?  I just happen to have a book here with me...maybe we should start here?

Merry Christmas!

Keeping X in CHRISTMAS

Linus, you amaze me with your Google like mastery of knowledge.  Especially history.  Especially Church history.
History is not a cage, but it does give shape and structure to the future.
Linus would be the first to shake his head at all the fuss over "Xmas".
Xmas isn't secular in origin, its Christian.
All the rhetorical bar fights over this stem from the bigger problem within Christendom:  poor, ineffective discipleship.
Important bits of knowledge have fallen off the wagon.
That's understandable. It's been a long journey.  A lot of things got picked up along the way, squeezing more and more things off to the side and some things right onto the road.

Xmas.  It's an acceptable abbreviation for Christmas used by Christians for more than 1,000 years. The hated "X" comes from the Greek letter Chi,  which is the first letter of the Greek word   Χριστός  translated "Christ" - anointed one.

Xp or Xt were commonly used for CHRIST.

Xn is still found in the dictionary as an abbreviation for Christian.

As a GenX Christian, Xn is attractive to me.

It's a brand I can get behind.  It speaks to a generation of Christians reclaiming primitive Christian thinking and lifestyle. A clear statement is made about the connection of those first generations of Christians who didn't presume to have it all figured out.  Their dialogue had not yet been constricted by a double elimination bracket of winners.

Orthodoxy, for them, gravitated around the cross.

X.

The Christ.

"Who do you say that I am?" Jesus infamously asked his disciple Peter.

Fisherman Simon. Disciple Peter.  Apostle Peter.  Saint Peter.

This kind of personal, spiritual journey begins with the answer to that question.

Gen X is boxed in at the center of the information age.  Overwhelmed by data and hypothetical answers that change with every new text book as new discoveries pour in on us exponentially, this is a generation more comfortable living in the questions than pretending to have the answers.

That's why this Christmastide, this Xn will be keeping the X in Christmas.

Thanksgiving

Strolling through the memories of Thanksgivings gone by I wonder aloud if there is any integrity left in it.

Thanksgiving.  The forgotten gentile feast day.

Retailers push Christmas shopping incentives closer and closer to Halloween.  

The traditional Christmas dinner is a Thanksgiving remix.

Turkey or Ham; honey'd and saturated in cholesterol enhancing steroids.  Bacon-ny green beans floating in some kind of goo.  Orange potatoes float in a hot tub of marshmallow foam. Pies. Cakes. Cookies. 

It's as if the angel of gluttony is passing over taking the first born of anyone who does not have their doorposts splashed from a ladle full of spinach dip and carrot juice.  

Our gluttonous indulgence with visions of bursting cornucopia dancing in our heads deceives.

Puritan and Aboriginal sit together at an Amish built trestle table glowing over genetically enhanced golden brown Butterballs and magically sweetened mythological maize of supermarket proportions.

 The Pilgrims made seven times more graves than huts. No Americans have been more impoverished than these who, nevertheless, set aside a day of thanksgiving.  -H.U. Westermayer

 Thanksgiving.  The tradition teaches the discipline of managing our attitudes.  Thanks is given, not for things granted -- or taken for granted-- but for life where death oppresses like a guerrilla boss and family where most of your kin are unreachable and friends where enemies abound and are born exponentially from a fragile trust.

Maybe it is no accident that Thanksgiving falls close on the calendar to Veteran's Day.
For those close to our hearts but far from our grasp, I choose to revere the forgotten feast day.  In their honor and in the spirit of the first Thanksgiving, gratitude will be an intentional attitude. It is an awareness of what I lack that fosters appreciation for what I have and those with whom I have to share it.

Linus van Pelt: This is not unlike another famous Thanksgiving episode. Do you remember the story of John Alden, and Priscilla Mullins, and Captain Miles Standish? 

Patricia 'Peppermint Patty' Reichardt: This isn't like that one at all. 

Linus van Pelt:  In the year 1621, the Pilgrims held their first Thanksgiving feast. They invited the great Indian chief Massasoit, who brought ninety of his brave Indians and a great abundance of food. Governor William Bradford and Captain Miles Standish were honored guests. Elder William Brewster, who was a minister, said a prayer that went something like this: 'We thank God for our homes and our food and our safety in a new land. We thank God for the opportunity to create a new world for freedom and justice."  

Patricia 'Peppermint Patty' Reichardt: Amen. 

HOO-ah. Schulz was NCO with the 20th Armor Division in 1945