Keller: disappointment v idolatry

Q: Is it necessary to suffer disappointment before seeing that idols don't satisfy?

I fear you may be right. I don't want that to be true. Very often it's much stronger than disappointment. It's hard for me to look at a young person and know what their idols are, because usually something has to happen in their life to frustrate them for them to see that something has inordinate power over them. No one learned about their idols by being told about them.

CT October 20th 2009

Keller: prayer v idolatry

Q. How do we get rid of idols?

I confess that I don't say much about that. Practicing spiritual disciplines is another book. I do say that analyzing and recognizing an idol is a step away from its power over you. You also have to have a heck of a prayer life. That prayer life can't just be petitioning. There has to be encounter, experience, and genuine joy. You have to have Jesus Christ increasingly capture your affections.

Christianity Today, 20th October 2008

#6 Greenmantle

So here's an interesting one: Minternational quite rightly placed The Thirty Nine Steps as a great book, but not so much Greenmantle. I think Buchan's first Hannay novel is also a fab read (ritually slaughtered by most TV productions), but actually I feel Greenmantle is the best of Hannay's adventures, and is unlike all the others. Most of the five novels follow a roughly standard thriller motif (though' standard' is a bit of misnomer, as Buchan helped to invent it). But this second Hannay story is a much broader and unexpected canvas - and alarmingly contemporary in many ways: an evil force has realised it can stir up the Muslim world to holy war by religious means, thus tipping the balance of WWI.

We also have some established characters from the first novel, whom it is nice to see again; but the addition of new, interesting men - the mysterious, almost supernaturally gifted Sandy, or Peter Pienaar - who have large parts to play in later novels.

The huge quest, the travels, the local culture and the complexity of the plot, make Greenmantle, for me a quite unusual Buchan novel, and probably my favourite (so far!)

Augustine: prayer

A quote I copied from my friend Doug, over at Triocentric:


Prayer is the affectionate reaching out of the mind for God



Wow. That fits so well with how this year has gone, prayer-wise; and is so encouraging.
There's lots of other quotes on the same post too...

Lewis: democracy

I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason.

Equality in Present Concerns (p17)

Po-mo definition

Postmodernity, then, can be described as a period of cultural disquiet. In the face of the betrayals and failures of past overarching metanarratives, culture-wide suspicion and incredulity takes hold. A single story, providing coherence to personal identity, grounding for ethical action and passion for life in history, is displaced by a carnivalesque existence of fragmentation, numbness and boredom. Final decisions based on rational analysis give way to the undecidability of keeping all options open, and the spiritual promiscuity of pop religion.

Walsh & Keesmaat, Colossians Remixed (p25)

#7 Everyman Pocket Poets...

Gerald Manley Hopkins.



It's possible you might expect John Milton to be turning up about now. But although my sympathies are far more Miltonic (Puritan, thrived under the Protectorate, disliked by Charles II) than Hopkins (introspective Jesuit priest), my desert island criteria lead me to choose him over Milton. Or rather his selected poems (in this rather lovely pocket edition from Everyman). If it was a case of 'complete works' I'd probably go for Milton - but in terms of the 'best of', it would be this volume.

When I first read GMH I wondered what I had come across, as it didn't sound like English. Which it wasn't really. I mean, the poems were made up of English words, but frequently the rules of grammar and syntax had vanished. Now, in some modern stuff I think this is just pretension. But with Hopkins I discovered there was reason to it. It's his 'in-scape' thing, which shows best in his nature poems - that (if I have this right) all created things have this inner dynamism, this self-existential energy, life and beauty - and in bringing this out in poems, normal language-rules take a back seat. But it's not a tumbling of words together that emerges; rather, the words must have been painstakingly selected, because not only do they reflect the inner sense and feeling of what he sees, the words also slot together, or blend, or build cumulative force - and almost it seems he is making the words 'taste' of the thing described.

Or possibly I have been eating too many herbal throat tablets. But I think I'm right.

For example:

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon (The Windhover)

which would get you marked down in class, but makes me almost taste a morning when one sees a hawk flying in dawn's light.

Or what I would think of as GMH's finest hour, God's Grandeur, which also (in lines 9&10) gives a tiny explanation of his 'in-scape' thinking:

THE world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Read it and weep - no one, I think, could ever write anything quite like that. As someone once told me, "That's the best 'ah!' in English literature".

Luther: joy of the Bible

Oh how great and glorious a thing it is to have before one the Word of God. With that we may feel at times joyous and secure; we never be in need of consolation, for we see before us, in all its brightness, the pure and right way. He who loses sight of the word of God, falls into disrepair; the voice of heaven no longer sustains him; he follows only the disorderly tendency of his heart, and of world vanity, which lead him on to his destruction.

Tabletalk, Word of God, 20

Three Men in a Boat #8

...by Jerome K Jerome...

It's a unique piece of literature, that was then emulated endlessly by other writers on other journeys. But the original is a classic. Narrated in the first person by 'J', it is on the one hand a genuine account of travel up the Thames in a bygone era, replete with historical and dramatic vignettes (wherein TV series like Griff Rhys Jones recent one on rivers, derive their origin); and also an utterly absurd comedy - Victorian manners, hypochondria, boating, pets...everything has that delightful, English silliness. There are daft events, but often the humour is wrapped up in J's monologues and digressions on dozens of subjects - sometimes silly in themselves, sometimes he is deadly ernest and only we know it's funny.

I think it's a lovely book, and would happily take it to a desert island: England described from a boat, and England unfolded from the observations of life, and England seen in the gentle comedy of life.