“God is Useless”
Jessica Hooten Wilson went on to explain a little later in her book “Reading For the Love of God…” that to use God is idolatry.
We humans cannot use God for any other thing than to be enjoyed. God is the end of all things. He is only to be enjoyed.
I’m only in Chapter 4 of this book, but loving it. Though I would “talk back” to her quite a bit about her discussion of the Bible … and I’m sure she would thoroughly approve being challenged.
Very good. I wonder if anyone here lives in a more mixed neighborhood, where block parties and other things can teach each other?
Maybe we can learn from each other.
Just this morning, I was able to greet in person an immigrant colleague of mine I had hitherto only known by email. I expressed appreciation for his dedication, calling my patients (he’s a specialist) on his own out of personal concern, and told him that many would not see a specialist if he didn’t come up here in the rural region. I am sure that it can be lonely, being such a minority, and would like to see more interaction.
Detroit was quite a contrast–East Asian, Arab, and many others in quite a melting pot. I would love my kids to experience that more.
Thanks.
It’s something I didn’t think of when we moved here. Also failed to recognize how much I would miss sidewalks. Actually, they’re both related. Sidewalks can make access to the neighborhood easy and casual. A constitutional around a (low crime) neighborhood is both safe, since one has a designated place to walk away from cars, and and an opportunity to easily connect with neighbors, no matter the condition of one’s car.
The closest neighborhood sidewalk I know of is about 7 miles away. People in my neighborhood don’t know each other.
I have a first edition copy somewhere around, probably in my storage unit. It’s pretty worn; the first time I read it I turned right around and read it again, and then a third time, plus several dozen times since.
I recall being annoyed by people using the “can’t see the forest of the trees” saying repeatedly over the years, always when thinking that the speaker or writer plainly didn’t understand that a forest is far, far more than just a collection of trees. Occasionally I would encounter its use where it was obvious that the user understood that even if someone saw all the trees both individually and together but nothing more then that person had failed to see the forest.
So the forest can’t be conflated even with all the trees; the trees are just the obvious feature. Indeed it’s possible to have a thousand trees growing together and not have a forest, and if someone presented a picture of such a stand of trees one of the forestry professors where I attended university would have said, “That’s not a forest” if the picture lacked midstory, underbrush, ground plants (& other growing things), fallen branches and fallen logs, and more – and that’s even before getting to the animals!
Given all the trauma of my childhood I could almost want to go back and do it again if I could skip the trauma, but more frequently I think I’d like to go back and start over after the worst of it because I now have tools for dealing with it that I totally lacked then. There is no way to recover years – decades – lost to not really living due to crippling from childhood, and for all the total joy in my life I may as well be fifteen again.
The majority of my life.
Reminds me of the standard instructions when lost in a wilderness: stay put, don’t rush about – and the rescuers will find you.
On the other hand –
No Beauty We Could Desire
Yes, you are always everywhere. But I,
Hunting in such immeasurable forests,
Could never bring the noble hart to bay.
The scent was too perplexing for my hounds;
Nowhere sometimes, then again everywhere.
Other scents, too, seemed to them almost the same
Therefore I turn my back on the unapproachable
Stars and horizons and all musical sounds,
Poetry itself, and the winding stair of thought.
Leaving the forests where you are pursued in vain
–Often a mere white gleam–I turn instead
To the appointed place where you pursue.
Not in Nature, not even in Man, but in one
Particular Man, with a date, so tall, weighing
So much, talking Aramaic, having learned a trade;
Not in all food, not in all bread and wine
(Not, I mean, as my littleness requires)
But this wine, this bread…no beauty we could desire.
~C.S. Lewis, Poems, (1964)
Regarding forests and trees, there’s more than a little likelihood you’re overthinking the metaphor? 
Yet this is totally antithetical to what Paul means by tradition, which is something passed on unchanged. The difference rests on a fatal flaw: it places the individual at the center as though each person is his or her own god. A true tradition is not changed by each new person who takes it on altering it, the tradition “born anew in each member”; a true tradition is passed on as each new person is born into it and transformed by it.
A tradition that changes is no tradition at all; change is a contradiction of what it means for something to be a tradition; as Paul puts it, “I handed on ('traditioned”) to you what I received".
Jesus didn’t say that traditions should be born anew, He said that we must be born again/anew/‘from above’. A tradition is indeed a living thing, but not because it is transformed, rather because it transforms all who receive it.
A living tradition is one that changes the recipient to conform to the tradition, not one the recipient changes to suit themselves. One that does not change but changes those who receive it can be called truth; one that is changed by everyone who adopts it can at best be called gossip.
God forbid it become a blatant boojum!
Regarding Reformed theology: if love is predestined, how can it be called love? It is merely programming.
It’s a M.A.S.H. unit, but one where everyone is a doctor and everyone a patient.
My contention is that God is omnitemporal, as you have seen, not that we can get our heads around it, but tensed language does not apply. Pre destined is exactly that, tensed. And ‘programmed’ the same: past tense. It is a wonderful mystery how he relates to us in the sequential time we experience, but he is limited by neither timing nor placing in his providential interventions.
Depends how one defines “passion”. Sometimes faith is quiet desperation.
A la Luther, “I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in my Lord Jesus Christ or come to Him, but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel…”
Though I would say that reason must balance with the passions, and both be ruled by faith.
And that’s a good question again today. I wonder what Kierkegaard would have to say about today’s situation!
I’d forgotten what an unmitigated arrogant ass Hegel could be.
Kierkegaard made a decent antithesis to his thesis, though.
I think he would be appalled. I’ve been reviewing F&T to pull together some ideas to discuss with a friend. I think SK’s comparison of the church to the universal and the similarities between the Knight of Infinite Resignation (ethical but without faith) and the typical church goer are frightening. If he is right in his assessement, then the best nearly all of us achieve is mere social morality.
The smaller pieces that he wrote much later for the newspaper were scathing and could have been written yesterday. Maybe update the vocab and denominational references a bit, but entirely relevant.
Interesting you should say this. I was just thinking while waking about the dialectic that SK explored between the Danish state church framed in Hegel’s concept of the universal and the faith of Abraham that SK explores with The Binding story. Without a background in SK or Hegel (except from a 20th century German history class c. 1988) I have been thinking about the Teleological Suspension of the Ethical as the likely resulting synthesis of the dialectic between the two. Without this synthesis, there is no structural place for faith to occur within the universal/the church, which is a major theme of F&T.
If you have some serious acquaintance with SK’s work, I may be picking your brain.
You’ve certainly read and processed a lot in this thread.
You get a 
for dedicated (insomniac) reading and processing. Nice work! 
I had this sudden image of a variant reading in Paul, “And yet I show you a more comfortable way”. That would be quite fitting for most Christ, I think.
“Be still and known that I am God” → silence
“Pray without ceasing” → words?
The Spirit prays for us with sighs too deep for words: “sigh-lence”?
I am absolutely saving this for future use!
Only if sentences can be of unlimited length. The proper term here, I think, would be “arbitrarily large” rather than “infinite”.
I think the real beginning of wisdom is surrender; that encompasses the fear of the Lord, and being still; one cannot be still before God apart from surrender because it takes surrender to let go of expectations, wandering thoughts, our own agendas, etc. Surrender even lets go of waiting for God to speak because that waiting isn’t just an expectation but practically a demand.
"The Lord is in his holy temple;
let all the earth keep silence before him.”
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IMO that Psalm should have quit at verse 11.
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For some reason what came to mind when reading this was an image from long ago: I was upriver a bit from a swimming hole, at a spot where the riverbottom was nothing but bedrock, and the greatest depth was about two feet. This made for rather calm/even flow all across the wide course, and such flow made for lots of standing waves (which, if one knows how to read them, reveals the shape of the riverbottom). Standing waves are fascinating because they are not composed of the same water molecules from one instant to the next yet their shape doesn’t change; they are “frozen” in form but constantly changing their content.
I remember thinking how awesome the physics of it was, especially since the existence of such standing waves is the result of the same core constants and relationships between the basic elements of matter as are the arms of a spiral galaxy or the flash of emerald green at the end of a sunset under the right conditions, and contemplating the fact that God knew the moment He established those constants and relationships that they would result in standing waves in rivers from time to time and here and there – but I never once stopped to ask what those standing waves might be meant to be teaching me!
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Long stretches of ‘mindless activity’ can be the result of having done something so often that you can pursue it for hours without having to stop for thought. Thus yard work and trimming the brush back from trails and such can become the mind’s quiet meditation while the muscles do their remembered work.
An interesting effect of this can be that after having worked half an afternoon if someone stopped me and asked what I had accomplished I would only be able to answer that by walking back to where I had started and visually inspecting my work, while if asked what I had been thinking about while I worked I could hold forth at great length.
By the way, someone quite far up in this thread mentioned The_Practice_of_the_Presence_of_God; in relation to what I just wrote, Brother Lawrence wrote, as I recall, that he found the Lord present in washing dishes – I’ve only found that due to the fact that I’ve washed dishes so often that I can do it like trimming trails; my hands know the job so my mind doesn’t need to attend to it, leaving me free to think about other things.
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A friend once blew up at a salesperson when she was referred to as a “consumer” – “I’m not a ‘consumer’, I’m a customer”, she snapped, and I tossed in, “And the customer is always right”.
I’ve had the same loathing of that term because it reduces everyone to a function, and that in relation to the wealthy few 0.5% who own 75% of everything.
It’s not just a Chinese phenomenon. Where my parents lived, a few years after the first digit in our calendar’s year switched from “1” to “2”, the government decided that the widening of US Hwy 101 north of the town, which had been determined to be necessary shortly after the end of the Korean War, and for which surveys had been carried out about the time Sputnik III (finally) went into orbit, and for which the land purchases necessary had been authorized while JFK was in the White House, should actually be done. In just the first half mile north of town, these happened: a business paved its parking lot, a restaurant radically improved its landscaping, and a motel added a wing. What did those have in common? In every case the new improvements were in sections of land where the highway would go. They were obviously moves to be able to insist on increased compensation, and indeed they ended up costing the taxpayers millions of dollars, but they were perfectly legal.
Yet He could be the pattern because He was the original pattern, the One Who gave shape to reality and everything in it, not in any arbitrary way but patterned after Him.
“Complaint against God is far nearer to God than indifference about Him.” --George MacDonald
(I’m listening to CS Lewis’ book of his quotes on Audible)
Nearer how do you take that to mean. Nearer to his heart, his awareness, so to speak? Or the person complaining is nearer?
indeterminate quantity
Sonnet from Malcolm Guite’s site, the parable, (as referenced by Jesssica Hooten Wilson in “Reading for the Love of God”)
How hard to hear the things I think I know,
To peel aside the thin familiar film
That wraps and seals your secret just below:
An undiscovered good, a hidden realm,
A kingdom of reversal, where the poor
Are rich in blessing and the tragic rich
Still struggle, trapped in trappings at the door
They never opened, Life just out of reach…
Open the door for me and take me there.
Love, take my hand and lead me like the blind,
Unbandage me, unwrap me from my fear,
Open my eyes, my heart, my soul, my mind.
I struggle with these grave clothes, this dark earth,
But you are calling ‘Lazarus come forth!’
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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