From the vestiges of Home-Group (St. Paul’s Carroll St., Brooklyn)
Spy on Doug Burr in iTunes!
New stuff to obsess over…
Still obsessing over…
Sufjan Stevens
Eastmountainsouth
Bird York

For whatever reason, today is a day of discontent. Not that anything is particularly bad; I just don’t feel like looking up people and correcting wrong information.
Tired. Bored. Just tired. And so it goes…

I watch the tides come in and go out as I am riding the train into the city and back home again. Between Newark and New York City, there are large stretches of marshland, rivers, and water-ways. The marshes are all brown and tan this time of year and when the sun is setting or rising, they are golden. It seems strange to see these marshes full of reeds and other water-plants in such urban settings – bridges, trestles, tracks, some abandoned factories, stranded boats sitting cockeyed on the banks of rivers. Yet, here are wetlands and in the spring the green pushes up and it is quite striking.
In the summer months when the wind blows, these stretches of land remind me of wheat fields in the plain states that cover acres and as the wind blows waves move across the landscape. It is like that.
In the wetlands – the marshes – as the tide comes in new “rivers” or “creeks” appear where water runs in to fill the marsh and again when the water drains away as the tide goes out. Nature moves in her own rhythm – coming and going, change, death and life. Creation.

What is “Mercy?” Really? If one where taking a photograph of “mercy,” what would it be? What would be the tableau?

It is days like today that make me glad to still be in New York City. Over the last couple of months, what I wanted most of all is to be in a much less populated area – and to chop wood! I used to chop wood every now and then when I was a kid, and that is simply what I thought about doing. Good, physical work, good exercise, good time to think – yup, give me an axe, some wood, and let me go at it.
Today, however, the weather is beautiful and I walked over to Bryant Park in Times Square for lunch. I love being there in nice weather – so many different kinds of people, so many different things to observe, to see, to experience. While eating my salad and watching all the people go by, suddenly someone decided to practice his bagpipes during his lunch break – just for a while, but it was very nice. Today, I am glad to still be in New York!
I missed an episode of “Lost” two weeks ago. I’ve waited until iPods were able to show video before buying one, so now I did as part of my birthday and Christmas presents. I downloaded the episode from iTunes for $2.00 and watched it commercial free. (Okay, either pay or suffer through commercials, I know, but sometimes paying is worth it!) Oh, technology!
The SLVR is a mighty fine cell phone!
Sufjan Stevens is a mighty fine tunesmith!
N.T. Wright’s book, The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture is excellent.
Our Lenten project for St. Paul’s youth (and a couple adults) is going well. “ImageFaith” is the project I came up with – during Lent, we take foundational concepts of the Christian faith, like Grace, or Mercy, or Hope and we learn a little more about them, discuss them, and then for the coming week we take our little disposable cameras and by noticing the “noise” all around us (all the stuff we miss in our incredible busy lives – stop and smell the roses kind of thing) we find “images” that connote the concept.
This past week Grace was the concept. It dawned on me that a wonderful image of “Grace” is sunlight falling on leaves. I took pictures of sunlight streaming down on plants. Unmerited favor, freely given by the sun, is “received” by the plants and made into substance. We receive unmerited favor from God, engage with it, and we are changed.
There were some great photos! It is a fun and interesting, and very challenging, project.

We hear so much about “experience” being an “authority” in our lives – we use experience to justify all manner of things. It often trumps all other authorities as if my own personal experiences can determine the right or the wrong, proper or improper, acceptable behavior or unacceptable behavior, right thinking or wrong, etc. I’m just not “all that,” as if I am competent to always make sound judgments all on my own.
There are two sides of experience, I think. Well, actually many sides, but these two are the particular ones I am thinking about right now.
First, there is the healthy aspect of personal experience that does inform our understanding of things. Most certainly our personal experiences lead us to and away from many things – thoughts, ideas, behaviors, places, etc. – often depending on whether our past experiences of those things brought harm or enjoyment to our lives. We are not, however, islands unto ourselves.
There is also a very unhealthy aspect of person experience due to the fact that we are creatures who so easily engage in self-deception. “If it feels good, do it” is not really a good motto to live by, despite what so many ’60’s generation baby-boomers want to believe. Sex, for example, in free-love with anyone we want any time we want does not bring us sexual-freedom or long-term fulfillment, does not contribute to healthy relationships where we are able to love and be loved in an environment of trust and vulnerability, does not contribute to healthy families in which children are raised to have a good sense of self-worth and self-respect, but it does help created isolation, lack of concern for the wellbeing of the other, and contributes to unwanted pregnancies, STD’s, and HIV infection. Is titillation really the best consideration? The same can be said for drugs, pornography, money, and so many other things. We are very creative in the ways we justify our self-destructive/deceptive behaviors and ways of thinking – and we compel others to join us.
It isn’t a question of whether sex (or any thing else in-and-of itself) is a good thing or not – of course it can be, is! The question is always about the responsible experience of such things, which brings me to my second thought about experience – our collective experience.
A better judge of what is good for us and what is not is the collective experience of many people over many generations. This may also be termed, “Tradition.” Because we are prone to self-deception within our own narrow bounds of maturity, education, and understanding, we will be wise to consider tradition regardless of whether it agrees with what we want to be or do at any given time.
There must be a balance between individual experience and collective experience – tradition. The ’60’s generation has made an art of elevating personal experience over collective experience and declares it a most important “authority” in our judgment of what is right or wrong for us individually and for society. Later generations have followed along, with corrections as they move from Modernity to Post-Modernity and rebel against the conventional doings of the preceding generation. And, of course, we Americans have so little regard for tradition. Well, we also are losing our ability to think collectively as our society fragments into individualistic isolationism – rugged individualism run amuck.
The tradition is not always right. Sometimes correction must be made, and it is a very messy time when correction takes place. We must avoid the pendulum swings that move us too far into individualism or too far into collectivism. There are times when I (we) must yield to tradition and the collective wisdom, because I am limited and narrow and inexperienced. There are other times when I (we) recognize something isn’t right and fight the majority opinion found in the tradition. Again, balance and a realization that my own opinion is not paramount are needed.
It is funny how the hard-conservatives and hard-liberals both rely upon extreme individualism when making their claims. We see the result in the polarization of our politics and in the culture-wars, which have intruded upon the Church. It seems that individual experience speaks to the authorities we use to make judgements, in relationship with tradition, but is not an authority all by itself.