First sign a girl is joining the family:

The lint in the dryer's lint filter is bright pink. Strange.

Pentecost 5: Hangin On

E heard an unusual amount of bells ringing at the church this morning. I wondered if it was their way of marking life in the Spirit after Pentecost Sunday and Monday.

It's not always as victorious as those bells make it sound. Sometimes it resembles the title the liturgical year gives it: "ordinary time."

Because sometimes the Holy Spirit gives that extraordinary courage, audacity, assurance, confidence, boldness to achieve wonderful things. Other times he's the one thing that just keeps us hanging on. Looks and feels ordinary I guess, but somewhere in there I wonder if it isn't just as extraordinary, just as worthy of ringing the bells.

Another strange dream...

The other strange dream I didn't know I have involving Icelandic musicians coming true...Sigur Ros on the Simpsons...?!?

Dream Team

The music of Julianna Barwick has been good enough for me to be an intrigued at-a-distance fan, but obscure enough for me to never purchase any of her music. But recording a new album in Iceland produced by Sigur Ros with the help of Mum and Amiina? This sounds like it could be a dream I didn't know I had come true.

Imaginative Empathy

I taught 5th graders about empathy once. I don't know if they would have understood this video, but I probably would have shown it to them anyway.

Portraits of My Father

taken by his daughter-in-law:

taken by his grandson:

The Question of Acts 3 and 4

Which is more astonishingly miraculous:

A man who's been paralysed for more than forty years suddenly running and leaping through the streets

or

Simple, ordinary, uneducated men asking for more chances to boldly speak the Word of God, despite threats and intimidation tactics from the most powerful men in society

?

A Barrel of Crabs

Speaking of the human condition prone to bare minimums,

I was just reminded of my wacky high school Physics teacher, who often endearingly offered a word of reproach in likening us teenagers to a barrel of crabs at the seafood market on the harbor port. He described it with much more animation than I can remember and articulate today, but there we are, a bunch of crabs, crawling all over one another in the bottom of the barrel, mostly miserable and yet content to bide our time in awaiting our impending doom, and as soon as one slowly crawls towards the top of the pack, reaching desperately toward the light of the day, the others grab him and drag him back in, never allowing anyone to escape the monotonous claustrophic prison.

I'm not sure the speech ever motivated us average physics students to actually do our homework, but I guess that's exactly the point.

Google tells me this metaphor didn't originate with my physics teacher, and that it's an image based on competition and jealousy more than anything. Which makes it only worse: we compete for bare minimums.

(God bless high school physics teachers everywhere, teachers of any age, of any subject, doing their best to combat the human condition day in and day out...)

The Good Samartan 6: Loopholes and Bare Minimums

In my mind, the entire parable hangs on one phrase. And not just the parable, but the entire human existence.

Verse 29: But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

Jesus had already responded and more or less concluded the conversation. But the lawyer continues. And so it's this question and the heart asking it that prompts the entire story in the first place. The man is not looking to love his God and love is neighbor with all that he has like the answer he had just given. He is looking only to justify himself. He is rule-abiding, and in so doing he is self-serving. And it's out of this inward-looking spirit that he asks the question.

"And just who exactly is my neighbor?"

He needs a more precise rule. He wants to know the requirements so that he can do it and cross it off his list; he wants to justify his action. ("Where am I obligated?") But he also wants to know the definition of neighbor so that he can get away with his excuses; he wants to justify his inaction. ("Where am I off the hook?") Like any average human, he's looking for the bare minimum to meet the requirement. Like any good lawyer, he's looking for loopholes that allow him to neglect the law whenever it suits him best. He's ignoring the spirit of the law, searching only for the letter.

We've heard this question before. We've seen this spirit before.

We heard it from the very beginning, with Cain asking, "Am I my brother's keeper?"

And we heard it even from the mouths of Jesus' disciples. Though I think the spirit was probably a bit different, it wasn't far away, with Peter asking, "How often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him?"

This is the enslaved, stingy, selfish, tight-fisted, lazy human heart. We prefer to justify ourselves in the easiest, least-costly way possible. And that's why we want precise definitions: so that we can find the closest neighbor, "love" them, cross it off our list, call it a day, go on living for ourselves, and fall asleep feeling a little more assured.

That's where Jesus is pointing: to this loophole-searching, bare-minimum-obliging, self-justifying, independent human spirit. And he's going to show us the opposite end of the spectrum.

petit rappel

In case you had forgotten, May seems like a good time of year to remind yourself just how good Arcade Fire is. The two boys dancing in the backseat, asking for it to be turned on and turned up, seem to agree.