Sidewalks are one of my gripes about this town: maintaining the sidewalks is the responsibility of the adjacent property owners, but there’s no enforcement; getting a disintegrating sidewalk fixed requires complaints from tow other property owners on the same block – no one else’s complaints count, so even if I reported to the city a crumbling and unsafe sidewalk Knox and I encountered on a walk it has no effect!
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I don’t think so. Missing the forest for the trees to me says missing the fact that a forest is far more than just the trees, it’s an entire ecosystem with mosses and fungi and brush and ferns and all the animals that live among all that.
If we value the Lutheran version of economic productivity, that being productive refers to quality rather than quantity, then I don’t agree we “devalue humanity”: valuing people for doing their very best elevates them. In there is an echo of Adam Smith’s recognition that capitalism is inimical to free markets; capitalism turns workers into cogs in a machine turning out the minimal marketable quality while free markets tend to reward quality (IIRC that was a point made by John Stuart Mill). Doing one’s best at what one does is thus a free market virtue and is also one that allows a person to take satisfaction in work rather than merely enduring it as so many do.
The colloquial metaphor is talking about only trees, a few obscuring your vision of the many, analogous to a myopic view (of anything) obscuring the more significant big picture. (When you start talking about other details of a forest, you’re taking a myopic view of the metaphor. ; - )
Maybe. But we’ve really shifted from the point of O’Dell’s book. She’s looking at the value of doing things, some which require great effort, time, even money, but that count as “nothing” in a value system that is based in economics. Art for the sake of the joy of it, or enjoying nature, learning to value the features of the bioregion in which one lives, building relationships with one’s neighbors, getting away, unwinding, taking time not to think, etc. These are all behaviors that count as “nothing” in a “value”-driven system of “values.” But they are essential for humans to be human.
Christians could extend this to prayer, worship (particularly private worship), singing and making music in our hearts to the glory of God, laying out on the hill behind my house in the styx and looking at the stars through field glasses and just sighing. These are all “nothings” of enormous value.
For example —
I knit. For myself and friends. Because I like everything about the experience and process; the engineering, dexterous challenge, watching the thing develop, the stunning results, the materials and tools, the designing and problem solving, the connection to other knitters, the connection with people I give my knitting to, the connection to history and geography, womens’ work and history and cultures. While I use my knitting, I do not knit because it is useful. I knit because it enriches my life. It is nothing.
This (and everything else I’ve been reading by Kierkegaard) reminds me…
@mitchellmckain
The more I read of SK, the more I realize that you were right. I don’t know who/what I had in mind, but you were right. Thanks for your patience.
Then it’s almost like he, the human, didn’t read the whole thing:
The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.
Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.**
Matthew 13:44-46
As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.
Matthew 13:22
(Or just skipped Matthew 13 ; - )
Because if ’the human’ actually had read Matthew 13, it’s pretty obvious he missed the point, that God’s kingdom (and knowing its King) is so supremely valuable (and inclusive, all encompassing), why would you want to hedge to seek something else later that could add to your haul?
Yet it’s not the case.
Maybe he was predestined to write that. 
Interestingly it was Western companies “investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America” that increased the standard of living in those countries more rapidly than would have otherwise have been true, and this happened because while Western companies were getting cheap labor they tended to think of “cheap” in their own terms, i.e. as a fraction of Western wages, so even though they were paying something like 15% of a Western skilled wage the take-home in those countries was often two or three times the going rate in those countries. In fact at one point Nike was attacked so vehemently for only paying something like $1.25/hour that they responded by increasing their pay to nearly $4/hr to make Western critics happy, and thus set off an economic disturbance in some countries because they were then paying from 500% to 800% of the local typical wage – and as a result other workers, especially in China, started to demand that their wages be at least doubled.
One result of this over time is that U.S. companies are starting to move operations back to North America; it’s now cheaper for a number of industries to produce goods for North American markets in Mexico than in China.
So what Western companies started by paying more than the local foreign wages got amplified by protestors ignorantly demanding not justice, which is what they said they wanted, but economic disruption that set off massive changes.
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I spent some time at a favorite swimming hole yesterday, a chunk of it doing something that’s become a sort of hobby for at least a dozen summers now: using river boulders and rock to focus the current so people on tubes and other flotation devices can zoom through otherwise shallow rapids without having to take to dragging their transport. In this specific case the structure I began will also reduce the current in the swimming hole itself, making it safer for smaller kids. In all these years, the only material “reward” has been a couple of sixpacks of beer and some BBQ chicken.
My mother was a champion knitter, following in the footsteps of my grandmother who was known across the state as one of the best knitters there was. They both knitted for the enjoyment, though also to make items for church and other charity sales, plus they turned out many practical items for the kids in the family. I never realized just how good they were until my older brother at one point while in grad school (math & computer science) needed a chunk of money and, since he was living in southern California and no longer doing much skiing took a half dozen sweaters, four of them with labels indicating they were knitted by my grandmother, the other two by our mom, to a very upscale store for handmade goods. He expected to have to sell them all, but after recovering from the shock decided to keep his favorite, and went home with it and somewhere over $2k. What really tipped the scales was that one of the store owners was a knitter – and had heard of our grandmother! Turned out that to someone who knew, those labels added $250 each to the value.
I learned to knit because our grandmother insisted that all her grandkids learn. One summer I entered some of my work at the county fair, and as I was filling in the info form I heard one of the judges, who was wathing to make sure I did it right, mutter, “Another one of those grandkids . . . well, we know who’s getting the purple ribbon!” (except I didn’t; my older brother also entered and he got that, I “only” went home with the blue with purple trim.
Now I wouldn’t even remember how to start a potholder or scarf!
My mom knitted for years because it was relaxing; she turned out over a hundred scarves and far more simple things like potholders and stocking caps all without paying attention; her hands knew what they were doing such that she could knit, watch TV, and carry on a conversation all at once and still turn out better work than I ever achieved . . . blue ribbons or not.
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Again I find myself reminded of Dr. Oswald Hoffman and a sermon he preached: he noted that there is nothing to seek “second” because the Kingdom of God is not so easily attained that there will ever be time for anything else!
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There are still vast disparities between what CEOs and upper management make compared with the people who actually produce the wealth, either from raw materials and food production or value-added goods.
That was a good point about pay scales within a Third World country and our perceptions in comparing them relative to developed countries, but disparity in wealth (aka greed) is a major driver of the dissatisfaction and the unrest or worse that results from it, Third World or otherwise. So @T_aquaticus’ citation of MLKJ is legit.
I’ts almost like he didn’t read all of what Kierkegaard wrote… or simply didn’t think about it very clearly. That is like how a creationist would read the Bible… saying once we read the Bible then we wouldn’t need anything else and so science is a waste of time because you already have all the answers of any truth or importance already. It sounds like the guy in the other thread saying science is anti-God because it doesn’t say anything about God. If this really were the attitude of the Bible, I would discard it in the nearest garbage bin.
Having God’s help with overcoming sin is NOT the end of the story but the beginning! That is when we can really LIVE and become creators ourselves in not only science, but art, music, writing, service, etc… Kierkegaard is quite right that we don’t have to buy into the rhetoric of religionists who want to make everything about them and their preoccupations.
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Oh. I missed that there was a question here. Thanks for the opportunity to think through and clarify, at least as far as I understand, why I think this section of The Lily… is so valuable.
The text itself answers your question:
and then
Kierkegaard demonstrates here that God recognizes our limited understanding and view of his Kingdom. He entices us to the good by accommodating the gospel to us a little. Before we can know for ourselves that God’s kingdom really is the only thing worth seeking.
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To analyze yet further, SK talks at length in Fear and Trembling (and I think in other works I haven’t read yet) about the superior worth of beginning a thing to finishing it. This seems counterintuitive, of course. However for someone who was closely atuned by nature to anxiety, he is a careful teacher. Beginning a thing is of greatest value, because, at that point, one has no idea of the outcome; that is still a mystery and all the effort to achieve the outcome has not yet be made; the risk of failure has not yet been taken. Anyone who carefully considers an undertaking (like counting the cost of a building project, as our Lord advised) does not enter blythly, ignorant of the potential and cost of failure, much less the cost of success. And with no guarantees. The guarantee of success or failure only comes once the outcome has come out and is known.
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In The Lily… SK explains to his beloved reader (incredible how tenderly he addresses his reader in this work) the loving way that God accomodates the ignorant and doubt-filled human, who is confronted with the confusing command to seek first the Kingdom of God, one that he can’t even understand really. As hard and confusing as it is, God will make it possible for you to begin, which is almost nothing at all (read the discourse to understand what is meant by nothing), and in beginning, find the seeking the most fulfilling thing one could pursue.
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Yes, thanks – that helps a lot.
When there is no end to the relationship once started, the seeking, learning, loving, cannot be any more fulfilling!
So I would hesitate only on the one point’s phrasing:
Since the relationship is itself the outcome (with no end), “the outcome has come out and is known”, it is knowable (and growable). (Yes! Fist pump. 
) Once you know you are in the relationship of grace with our Father, that doesn’t stop, not that there are never ‘dark nights’.
And there are guarantees… and warnings about the guarantees, to make sure they’re not counterfeit, so to speak. I don’t have a list of the warnings, but I do the guarantees… and I’m sure it’s longer: The Christian’s Confidence & Eternal Security, a list.
But none of this is known before one begins.
And never minimize the horror of the dark nights, which for some last years, decades. Those brothers and sisters do not need our condemnation added to their anguish. They have the warnings branded in their minds aready. They know the magnitude of the loss they didn’t seek.
I’ve proposed that CEO compensation in all forms be limited to fifty times the median pay of their employees – last I read it was at about four hundred times that of a median employee, along with a maximum wage set at a hundred times the minimum wage, using the lowest minimum wage for an area; for example, in a state where the state minimum wage was $12/hr while the federal minimum wage remained at $7.25/hr, the maximum wage would be $725/hr and that would be computed by applying all forms of compensation to actual hours worked. Given that some corporate officers earn the equivalent of $3500/hr, they would suddenly be lobbying for a much-increased federal minimum wage.
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The rest of the verse explains the seeming conundrum: “and all these (other) things will be added to you” – i.e., seek the Kingdom and all other good things show up as essentially a by-product, which means there’s no point in seeking any of them especially since there’s no guarantee that if we seek them we shall get them!
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The following quote from “Screwtape Letters,” by C S Lewis, convicted me about how we can unintentionally rationalize hatred of others–as long as we say we hate on someone else’s behalf. How many times do we justify anger and objectification of our opponent because they appear unjust to someone, or something, we are protecting? We in the West appear to be a nation of idealists–and yet, it’s a stepping stone to the Hell of conflict that is not the less selfish, because it panders to our insecurities.
Hatred we can manage…If conscience resists, muddle him. Let him say that he feels hatred not on his own behalf but on that of the women and children, and that a Christian is told to forgive his own, not other people’s enemies. In other words, let him consider himself sufficiently identified with the women and children to feel hatred on their behalf, but not sufficiently identified to regard their enemies as his own and therefore proper objects of forgiveness.
I’d be interested in what others think. Thanks.
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