Category: Uncategorized (Page 3 of 4)

They are all the same, though their frames are different.
Silver, red, blue and black… a line of cars sit in a row,
as their drivers speak into a speaker and listen to garbled tones.

At the window will be a drink made-to-order.
A custom cup served up with a smile,
steaming-hot or chilled on ice, but steeped in attention no less.

Me in my in plaid blue shirt, the one with the pocket once torn.
Thoughtfully this shirt was mended for me; I cannot escape that stream of affection.
And I grin when thinking of the little foot that did the tearing.

Caught up in today’s rush torn garments are of little value,
they are discarded without a second thought;
with little regard for the hands capable of mending.

I consider the careful fingers able to do the stitching…
somehow their care makes it into the weave, I have a feeling.
The few stiches over my chest give me a full suit of armor.

Perhaps the hands that serve our tea offer the same kinds of blessing;
hands attending to battered hearts and words to tired minds.
We are line of wounded persons being steeped in careful attention.

True, I do not “get out” much these days, but I do know an interesting conversation when I enter one!

Having two kids and one on the way it is not often that my wife and I get an afternoon away to entertain new ideas or even have the opportunity to cross paths with new people. Ironic we should have met a new person in an antique store, but less and less strange as we discovered that this gentleman belonged in there.

It had been a spontaneous decision to stop off at the store for a minute… as Aunt Kimmie had offered to watch the kids for a few hours and we were only driving through town to drop off the water bill and return some library books. Parking behind the city park, like so many times before, this time I did not offer up lip service saying “I would like to go in there sometime.” Instead there was no reason keeping us from stopping in: no busy hands to break things, no little tummies that were hungry, and no promises of ice cream treats to stain little cheeks. So…when my wife said “Oh look, the antique store. Do you want to go in for a bit?” I stood there strangely pondering and found it bizarre that I actually had a choice in the matter on this particular morning! It took me a while to answer, but finally “Yes…yes I think I do!” was my reply.

I loved absolutely everything about our visit. The old brick that welcomed us was more than facade, it led on among four walls of times forgotten with thick, heavy rafters running overhead. Each beam appeared to be a single cut log, tree trunks really, that had noticeably been shored up with hand tools; tool marks and lines of imperfection gave each beam a certain individuality and they stole my attention for some time. We walked down the right side of the store admiring aged cherry and mahogany desks, looking in all their secret compartments and asking questions about little knick-knacks that were displayed on each and every shelf and surface.

The kind lady that worked the right half of the store, explained that she ran the “furniture-part” of the store and that this building once operated as an ice house. Today the building held in its’ frame antique furniture (some from roughly the same time period as the building itself) and the other half of the store was a custom framing operation for portraits and prints. For a minute I sat, reclined, in an old Quaker rocking chair that I was afraid was going to drop me, but it sure enough did not. Just after poking my head around the wall that divided the two halves of the store, I saw that the other side had only fabrics and framing materials… and its’ few employees, I presumed, standing up toward the front.

I sat for a moment in a replica of a corner chair before my wife Mel and I scooted-off up the thick cut, timber stairs that curled up the back wall to the loft of the ice house. We could feel how old the wood was beneath our feet as the darkness of the stair well opened to the brightness of the upper floor. There were not many things up top, so I walked toward a front window and was pleased to discover some old soda bottles, and I am glad I did but not solely because I am a collector.

When I made my way back down the stairs, with an arm full of glass treasures, another lady working the desk on the framing-side of the store began wrapping each bottle and nestling it down into a brown paper bag branded “Ice House Oddities”. About that time I heard a raspy but, exuberant voice ask me “Ya ever go bottle digg’in!?” I informed the man behind the voice that I would not know where to look.

So we began in what I thought would be a two phrase exchange. Again, I am glad that it was not.

A gray haired man in a pair of bi-focal glasses and with a button-up, pocket shirt continued in his advice, that if I were to locate an old outhouse that I could dig up plenty of bottles. Fifty years ago, I suppose, that would have been a pretty grotesque endeavor but, now-a-days I would only be digging through fertile soil… that did much to change my image of the scene. The man further explained that back when indoor plumbing was introduced that folks began using the outhouses as garbage dumps and how those times were long before concerns of “The Environment” were so very prolific.

Not yet finished in our exchange over the subject of outhouses, he had mentioned that every so often the outhouses would have to be dug-out (i.e. cleaned out) and this old timer went on to educate me on a few new terms. A gully he said was just a valley where two good sized hills settled into a ditch (being a country boy myself, I was savvy on this term) and a washer he said was when a torrent of rain would come through and send a “Gully Washer” down through the trench. The washer term was one that I had never before heard of being applied to a down-pouring of rain.

Now, a clever friend of his had positioned his outhouse just at the mouth of a gully and so every few months when a Gully Washer would come through, the cleaning of his friend’s outhouse was naturally automatic. Sending me into a wry smile and a few chuckles I had commented that this brought on a whole new meaning to the term “Gully WASHER” and danged if this old man didn’t miss a single beat and exclaim, “Yeah, how about a Gully FLUSHER?”

We all three broke into a fit of laughter and I could not help but offer up my hand to congratulate my new friend on his comedic success.

After shaking my hand he began to ready himself to leave. He had been standing at a hind counter, pen in hand, over an index card. A black and white pattern had caught my eye and now I had the comfortable grounds on which to intrude. “What do you have there?” I asked, thinking that he was scribbling some words on a pre-printed card stock, the design was so bold and intricate that I thought for sure he couldn’t possibly have drawn it; the design being so very fine.

“Just doodling.” he had said in an un-presuming tone. “It’s yours if want it.” That is when I realized I was talking to an artist. The card held an imaginative work of art, how could I possibly? “Well, I don’t want to take this, if it could be used as inspiration for another piece someday.” For a moment the paper switched back to his hand and I am sure he had thought maybe I did not want the clutter. Snatching a pen off the counter I said, “Well…you will have to at least sign it!” His eyes lit up a bit as I assumed he could tell how much I did like the design. “Let me use my good pen” he retorted as he pulled it from his shirt pocket. ‘Wm. Tippie’ was the name that he signed.

He seemed pleased that I liked it so much and he proceeded to show me a few more of his “doodles”, that he had captured as images, on his phone. We flipped through three or four doodles as I could tell that the one I held in my hand was not his best or even a finished work, though I liked it the same. “Here is my card, if you wish to come see some of my other art. A few of my pieces used to be displayed in some galleries around town but they have all recently been closed.”

I am sure many people consider themselves to be artists and it is a shame that they cannot vouch for their own work matter of factly in a commonplace conversation, but I have the feeling that a true artist would not do so even if they had reason to boast. Perhaps the best artists, just as the best people, do not know just how good they are.

Our last words we shared were those concerning his health, he explained to me about how his blood pressure had been all “out of whack” until he began doodling; how he had tried five different medications and how none of them had seemed to work. But, when he had begun “doodling” his blood pressure magically normalized! In this context, “A doodle a day keeps the doctor away” it seems. This did amaze me…but not quite so much as the beautiful abstract that I glanced down at on card-stock. How it did change my day!

Pointing to the branding on my paper bag, Mr. Tippie inquired “You know why they let me hang out in here don’t you? It’s that last word in there.” I laughed, thinking to myself that was about right, though he was not what I would call “odd” as the word odd has a stigma attached to it, he was indeed “an oddity”! And an oddity that my wife and I had thoroughly enjoyed that morning.

As I swung my bag by the handles, exiting the store, I heard someone say “Later, Bill.” Not to me, but to Bill Tippie as he thanked them for letting him camp out for a few hours on a Saturday morning. From one Bill to another I could have told him right then that I would definitely be calling him later. Perhaps he had already figured that much.

After two weeks had passed I had serendipitously been finishing up a piece of writing that had not been written regarding a soda bottleas main subject, but that had included a soda bottle from my youth as a supporting image, that I remembered seeing in my grandparents’ garage when I was young. Recently, my grandparents had given me an old six-pack of special addition RC Cola bottles with faded orange and blue paint from the seventies (old for me but not so old for my new friend). The subject matter of my writing piece was the coincidental thing though…the title I selected was “Digging Down“, and in it I was surmising that we should all cut busyness and agenda in order to share time with the important individuals of our lives. And so with the overwhelming feeling that an important person had entered my life I called up Mr. Tippie and told him “This is the other Bill speaking.” I was pleased that he did remember our conversation and I caught a chuckle from him as I assumed he was remembering our gully flusher exchange.

So, when I showed up to his home not knowing what to expect, he led me up the stairs in his two bedroom home, to his “gallery”.

As two of the three galleries containing his art had been closed, he confessed that he did not know just how much art he had accumulated until he was forced to consolidate it. His main “gallery” now doubling as his guest bedroom, was impressively covered, surface upon surface, with art. His word “accumulation” I thought very odd though, as that is a word that suggests glancing out the window on a winter’s day and being surprised at the white blanket that wraps all the greens and browns in a unified coloring of white. That could not have been what this was.

As I perused the collection, I found it quite baffling how ANY of this had happened! The collection was astounding and diverse. Another of his comments had been that he had never been able to settle into any form “of style” for his art. I now truly came to know this man, not as a self-proclaimed artist, but I began to see the art that this man had brought to each day he had lived. Surely, he had lived in a world of imagination as if each day was a blank canvas; suddenly I could not have been more aware of how ALL this had happened.

Our visit ended by him gifting me a pen and ink, an image he had shown me on his mobile phone at the Ice House and a piece that I had been mesmerized by. Upon my arrival of our second visit together, I had given him one of the six soda bottles from my grandparents’ garage, along with the words I had written and wished he would enjoy reading. Tippie had said, “Now we are even.” but, in my chest I knew how unbalanced the deal was that had been struck.

I had looked through a few easels loaded with art and Bill and I ended up in his art studio where he showed me a few pages of a scrap book that he had complied, cataloging some of his earlier works. It was all impressive. The most impressive thing to me, however, was sitting atop the corner of a short dresser, against the wall of the guest room just beside a padded, wicker chair covered in art. A half-inch thick notebook of what Tippie called his “doodles”. I had hoped, through his word choice, that he was not suggesting them as a “lesser” art, because to me they are the most artful of all; brilliant works of imagination that adorn the pages of a priceless book of masterful visions.

Quite a day this was for me.

The name of one of his “pen and ink doodles” stuck firmly in the corner of my mind:

What a day – a Tippie Doodle Dandy!!!

Tippie Doodle Dandy

When you are young the world seems so small.

Grown-ups ferry you from building to building and place to place. Walls and fences serve to hold the outside world at a safe distance and as children we need not know of the supposed framework holding it all together. Even as a child though… we still catch glimpses of traffic as it passes by.

There’s traffic in the sky
And it doesn’t seem to be getting much better
There’s kids playing games on the pavement
Drawing waves on the pavement
Shadows of the planes on the pavement
Its enough to make me cry
But that don’t seem like it would make it feel better
Maybe its a dream and if I scream
It will burst at the seams
This whole place will fall to pieces
And then they’d say…

Well how could we have known?
I’ll tell them it’s not so hard to tell
If you keep on adding stones
Soon the water will be lost in the well^[1]

The four-line chorus above sends me to a place in my thoughts, an arid plain where dust is blown in gusts and you have to squint your eyes to gain any partial visibility. The small village I see doesn’t look like much, most of the mud-brick structures are near collapse and their occupants sit along the exterior walls, slumped over in defeat as they look to the center where the streets meet. All the best stones they have pulled from their foundations for the building of a wall; the sides of a well that circle ever-upwards toward the heavens. The stones extend high above the roofs of the clay hunts, and all eyes watch as a bare-foot, dark skinned boy climbs a rickety make-shift ladder. His legs wobble as the bindings that lash the struts together creak and snap. On his head the boy balances a bucket on a leather strap, he tilts his nose downward to keep the strap from slipping off his sweaty forehead and the empty bucket moves out from his back and knocks between his small, bony shoulder blades with each..shaky..step..upward. His eyes are fixed on the last rung and a rope dangles over his right shoulder as he carefully moves up the last step. Then the real tragedy sets in as the rope end wags… brushing the dirt at the base of the ladder.

Even if the boy were to lean over the edge, down into the mouth of the well, what hope is there that he could ever reach the water far below the ground? Too many stones have been added and the water has been lost deep below. Lost, in the well.

As a boy myself, I remember playing games, but I also remember the shadows of the planes on the pavement.

I remember Sunday afternoons, after church, driving with my parents over to my grandparents’ house in the city. Though Ma and Pa’s house did not feel like “the city” because they kept things so very simple. Ma had a washer and dryer, yet preferred to let the clothes air dry, outside on the line. She had raised four boys in that two bedroom house… things were always kept tidy and neat. And, as I am sure my father did, I found comfort as a child in the routine and simplicity that is Ma and Pa. We always sat around the same table, ate the same food, and curled up in the same places to take our naps. On nice days we would all be energized and want to enjoy the fresh air of the back yard.

Sitting just beyond the patio, next to the separated single-car garage was a “porch” style swing that would fit three adults or snuggly fit two adults with two kids sandwiched in between. We children had to take turns swinging with whomever was in the swing. When we were small we did our best to touch our feet along the ground and help push the swing higher, but until we were a bit older and longer our efforts were futile at best; our little legs could not reach the six concrete pavers that were set into the grass below. However, we could arch our heads backward over the crook of the green metal swing and stare up into the Gum tree high above.

The Gum could not have been more magical if it had dropped gum balls on us… as in the spring it would drop small round seed casings about the size of a large cherry, stem and all! The Gum balls were bright green and firm in the early spring and grew prickly spines and turned brown as summer approached. The sky itself was barely visible close towards the house where there was another maple tree (off-set several feet from the Gum). The T-supports of the clothes line started there next to the Maple and extended towards the back fence row. How fun it was to run beneath the hanging laundry and to weave in and out past the end post. We ran wildly back into the long yard that opened up to blue skies.

I remember just how quiet it was there, in that closed-in back yard. That is, until the belly of a plane would move from low-to-high into the distance with a roar. The planes were so loud that if you had closed your eyes you would have believed they weren’t more than stones-throw away.

Still, there are those memories, of being a kid, and of eating ice cream sandwiches and rainbow bars in the afternoon sun. Attempting to climb trees with branches so high we could only hope to reach them with a jump. We usually settled into a game of croquet, a game that for us, had none of the typical rules and consisted instead of seeing who could swing the mallet the hardest… knocking a colorful ball to the back fence in the least number of swings. The croquet set that we used was a seemingly ancient one. One that my father had played with when he was young. Among the cob webs of the garage there were other discoveries lining the slatted, wooden walls: old tools and empty RC Cola bottles commemorating the Kentucky Colonels basketball team. I remember fragments of the conversation that we would have on such afternoons and the calming breeze that could be felt… before the traffic in the sky would startlingly come roaring by.

Airplanes will always remain to represent a crowning achievement in technological advancement… I am not suggesting that there were not incremental steps along the way and that air travel would have even been possible without the advancements of other technologies, I am simply saying that planes are impressive. And how about the computer and electrical system advancements that control the traffic in our skies! All these are impressive stones.

But, now it occurs to me that more important lessons may be learned from digging down, rather than adding stones onto the tower of human progress:

Puzzle pieces in the ground
But no one ever seems to be digging
Instead they’re looking up towards the heavens
With their eyes on the heavens
There are shadows on the way to the heavens
It’s enough to make me cry
But that don’t seem like it would make it feel better
The answers could be found
We could learn from digging down
But no one ever seems to be digging
Instead they’ll say…

Well how could we have known?
I’ll tell them it’s not so hard to tell
If you keep on adding stones
Soon the water will be lost in the well

Words of wisdom all around
But no one ever seems to listen
They’re talking about their plans on paper
Building up from the pavement
There are shadows from the scrapers on the pavement
It’s enough to make me sigh
But that don’t seem like it would make it feel better
The words are still around
But the words are only sounds
And no one ever seems to listen
Instead they’ll say

Well how could we have known?
I’ll tell them it’s not so hard to tell
If you keep on adding stones
Soon the water will be lost in the well^[2]

For over five years I have worked at a rather fervent pace in downtown Louisville. My grandparents’ home is only ten or so miles from the tall sky scrapper that I work in, due north of the airport. With an open invite to lunch, I recently did make it back over to their house. Sitting and talking with Pa, I enjoyed asking him questions and digging down. There is a fulfilling quality hidden within such conversations. And on my way back into the office I considered what kinds of walls I had been building. Walls at least tall enough to cast sizeable shadows and thick enough to muffle the voices of the meek. Perhaps, we should all find ways to draw some of “the sounds” around us back into the bucket; back into words… as water from a well.

In the vast gap between question and answer, silence becomes a sound. Perhaps those of us that are the most simple are also the most able to frame these sounds into words; into phrases capable of reaching the wellspring of being that has been lost in the depths, beneath the stone. Such waters offer a refreshing drink for one’s soul.

Before I walk back into my building to sit at my computer, I hold in my two extended hands a draw-knife that belonged to my grandfather’s grandfather. Its design is simple, a sturdy marriage of soft wood and hardened steel. My grandfather’s gift to me is that I will possess something that his father, and his father before him, had held in their hands. A greater gift still -if I could hold something of their heritage in my heart and mind. Today, I find that the stones in the wall… have been little more than minutes, of busyness and of agenda.

Laying some of those stones aside I sit with my grandfather as he remembers a few words that his father left with him: “Sometimes it will bring a tear to your eye just to think about it,” he says, “and Dad said ‘Son in this world we may never be worth much, but we can have a good name.’ and I think that’s about as important as anything that you can have that comes along.”

Pa went on to say “Life is not about how much money you make or how big your house is, it’s about how you treat people.”

While this may seem like common knowledge, how many of us continue spending the majority of our time and efforts paying-off bigger houses instead of nurturing the priceless relationships of people that wish to share in our lives (this author included)?

If we continue pulling stones from places of sanctuary we will leave our souls vulnerable and exposed. And despite each effort to do something great with our lives we will only serve to un-settle ourselves more completely.

“You have to set aside time for things. Otherwise you miss out on the things that are worth the most to you.” -William Thomas Hudson (Pa)

[1] Traffic In the Sky, Song Written By Jack Johnson, 2003 (Universal Records)

[2] Traffic In the Sky continued, Link To Listen: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtJIu0Tylb0

Blue waves of light scatter on the horizon
and ease me into quiet conversation.

A wordless dialogue: soft, pink, radiant and
framed in abstracts of powder white plumes,
the smooth, fair cheek of a fragile china doll.

The morning sun burns rouge as a ringed outline appears.
Masterful strokes of white lay against the gray-blue vastness.
A scene of grandeur painted by the Divine, the grammar of bright star and cloud speak volumes.

First, a golden scepter reclining on its side,
resting atop a plush pillow-cushion that unfurls gentleness below.

As the handle turns upward and the jewels reach heaven,
it seems the gems were not jewels after all but sparkling eyes beneath a brim.

Next, a radiant face shines beneath an adorned brow,
a handsome, pristine head-dress stands quilled; visible rays of yellow-orange feather tips giving wings to my soul.

From this height, the signal of the beacon now becomes known,
ascending the tower of sky, beyond the mist, a faint image now clear.

Finally, a lighthouse of grace upon the coast; a guide for battered ships,
away from the rocks and toward the pass as I journey near.

I shall not forget the wings of heart this morning I have discovered.
In flight, I can soar above the rocks and brush the fragile cheek of heaven.

When night arrives, and I kneel down to embrace my daughter,
it is the bright blue eyes of my china doll, that call me back again; back to the cheek of heaven.

Sitting behind the house of a dear friend of mine, having a cup of coffee, I am graced by the soft morning light that makes its way through gray clouds. Gentle gusts of wind move through the leaves of a locust tree and make their way to where we are seated. The breeze is refreshing. My hands embrace a cup of freshly brewed coffee that has both milk and honey (a mixture my friend says is “The Promised Land in a Cup”). On this particular morning my friend reminds me that “perspective is everything”; I could not agree more. In contrast to the surrounding yards… I am immersed in a garden. Tall trees of all kinds and floral colors create a perimeter where thought can soar. Blush roses and blood-orange lilies enter my contemplative gaze and make audible the inaudible voices of nature. At this moment I become consciously aware that if I were to glance over my left shoulder all of this perception would be over-shadowed by a gigantic water tower that looms above the roof of the house. I choose not to look over my shoulder. In a few minutes when I walk through the house on my way back into the world, off to work, I will see glimpses of the city’s industrial park where the tree line is thin. The urban elements that surround my friend’s home only serve to enhance my appreciation for the refuge and peace this place offers me.

Many of us recognize the Garden of Eden as a physical location that existed for a period of time in Earth’s distant past, a place where man was able to walk with God. As the story goes, immediately following mankind’s exile from Eden, our earliest ancestors were forbidden to return there. The scriptures record that the Garden and the Tree of Life within were thereafter guarded by a mystical sword that flashed back-and-forth ensuring that man would no longer be allowed to possess both knowledge (the knowledge of good and evil) and life eternal. Today, either our eyes deceive us or this Garden has vanished from the face of the planet. Eden today seems to be more a symbol of purity and innocence than an actual place we could visit to encounter grace.

As I drive to work I begin to think deeply about the mystery of Eden and the Cup of the Promised Land. Whether these places are in fact geographical locations or are purely spiritual refuges… my perception of them as either “origin” or “destination” suddenly seems of importance to me. The popular opinion held by most seems to be that ever since mankind was banished from the Garden at “The Fall of Man”, the Earth and particularly the people that dwell in it have been moving along paths toward destruction. “Times are getting worse.” I often hear, “A good man is hard to find!” Others remain hopeful that a new Eden awaits us.

Personally, I wonder if there may be an alternative perspective.

I have recently begun to think of the Garden of Eden as the place where our temporal universe and the realm of the eternal converge. Thinking of the descriptions from the Bible that tell of Eden, a place where four rivers come together, lush and green, and thriving with life. I like to imagine that two of these rivers (the Pishon and Gihon) were spiritual springs that have since quelled and that the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (the two that remain today) brought in the earthly waters. I imagine that perhaps the Garden once provided man with a place in which to encounter the heavenly realms, a middle-ground with rich soil cultivated by spiritual waters, a ground upon which the true experience of God was in full bloom.

I believe our own spiritual cultivations, if they are true, can produce eternal gardens in which our friends, families, and loved ones may experience the goodness of God. Isn’t this exactly how we have been taught to pray “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven …”?

I often love to sit and reflect on the times and the places that have represented “Eden” for me. Most of these memories involve elements of the natural world and also being in community with those whom I love most. Both nature and our loved ones are good at hiding us from the world and creating a “space” for us; they create for us places that time cannot touch, where the eternal is welcome and may become known. These spaces are heavenly gardens that are accessible from earth.

Mankind is far removed from the Garden. From the Garden to the village, from the village to the town, from the town to the city. States and nations; we have become part of established societies. But, have the urban bricks of our society built up a high wall around us… a high wall that blocks our view of the distant horizon and stifles our wonder of what is beyond?

Is the countryside now just a place that is barely visible and that can only be seen by those who dare to climb the heights of the city-wall and bravely peer into the distant unknown. How might a person shout back down the wall, how might a person describe to their friends and begin to put into words the sights they have seen? What language can dare to touch the true experience of the Divine?

Only memories perhaps…

Three young boys, just filled up on garden-fresh vegetables, country ham, and fried okra. Three young boys with smiles that reach their eyes. Fishing poles held overhead as short legs whip through tall grass. Over creek and under branch. Up this trail or down that trail? Only one worry in their minds. Only one worry in their worlds. Shall they go to the upper pond or the lower pond? Mystery will await them at either. How many fish will they bring back? Fresh, fried fish for dinner… a true country delight.

Memories such as these bring the warmth of country summers to dreary days in winter cities. Harvesting the fruits of our memory is the best way to beautify our gaze. Only when we begin to look through beautiful eyes will our perspectives begin to be transfigured.

The gravel road to Granny’s house. A cedar plank fence affront a long ranch house. Here, you are veiled from the outside world. At Granny’s house you are special. Everyone lines up at the door, each sibling does not dare enter before receiving a tight hug and more than one kiss. At Granny’s a greeting hug may span three minutes, but the effects are lasting and eternal. Many cats gather at the back door to be fed at dusk, the tall cedars become a softening canvas as the night approaches, for stories of “Barron”, the not-so-best dog they ever owned, and then Taffy, the best dog ever! Taffy, the dog that befriended the multitude of cats. In the distance is Barren’s old, rickety, cedar plank dog house still visible, just visible, outside the darkening tree line. The birds perch on this branch and flutter to that branch. From maple to walnut, and then from oak to cedar. The branches twitch until we can no longer see them and the trees become a subtle silhouette etched into the night sky. Pa Daryl stokes the wood burning stove. The smell of burnt wood and the comforting scent of hand-knitted afghans cover us; they keep us warm long after we have left the hearth of their warmth. There will be goody-bags and ginger ales for the trip home; a peaceful trip back home, to the city, not beyond the reach of a Granny’s love.

I once asked my Granny what her fondest memories were. Turns out they were with her Granny (her mother’s mother). Grandma Beal. Perhaps it was her kindness that my Granny has passed on to me. Here are my Granny’s words regarding Grandma Beal:

“Every summer we would go spend a week or two with Grandma, each one of us children (away from the rest) would have a week alone with Grandma. And she loved us all and she loved us to death. And we couldn’t do any wrong when we were down there, except that when we did something wrong we got our butt whipped ha ha ha, and we got sat in the chair… but, we didn’t do any wrong ha ha ha.

She didn’t have any running water, we had to pump the water out back. She had a cow when I first went there, in the city! She tried to teach me how to milk the cow. And she had chickens… a whole big chicken yard. I would go and get the eggs every day, she taught me how to do that. She had a garden, and she had a plum tree that was delicious (delicious prunes), and aaah, peaches!! She had peach trees all-in-one-lot, every kind of peach you can imagine, and when they were hot from the sun and ready to eat she always knew. By helping Grandma we learned country life early.”

Through our memories… I think we can bring country-life to the city, as spiritual waters to urban stone. I have heard it said that “prayer is the art of presence.” A person’s presence can without a doubt soften hearts of the hardest stone. It is indeed people like my grandparents that teach us the art of presence, and where did they learn it?! My Pa Daryl has one of the most peaceful presences such as this. I had often wondered how he was so able to nourish his spiritual “Garden” (that is: his presence). Here is a memory he shared, that has continued to shape him, and that now shapes me:

“I was raised on a farm. We had a ninety-six acre farm that was an extension of my grandfather’s (my father’s father’s) four-hundred acre farm. For me, I was the youngest of nine children, and what I remember was that when my mom and dad first started they lived in the bottom of what we call a hollow; they lived in a log cabin. At the hollow’s base it was no wider than two-hundred feet and opened-up beyond the hill into our family farm. Later on, my parents moved up to the hill. If I remember correctly the house was 12-by-24 feet, with an attic up there, and then later-on they finally cut wood off of our own property and made three little rooms on the back.

I think the one thing that I really enjoyed was… in that hollow where my mother and dad had that log cabin, I went back over there, and there was a spring that ran down beside it. And I went down there when I was young, maybe in the sixth-seventh grade, and I wanted to camp out. So what I did is… I cut some trees, small trees, and I made like, a lean-to. And I made a bed. I used grass-string for the mattress and I had a dog, a Collie-dog, and we would go over there. I draped some cloth for the front of it, and we would lay inside, and you could hear the water going by… and it was just real peaceful.”

Later Pa Daryl would give me more details of how at that time the log cabin was no longer there but, that there was only the reminisce of an old, small barn down there. “The roof of my lean-to,” he said, “was made from a scrap of tin. Me and Collie-dog would lay down there most nights and even if it started to rain we would stay down in the hollow until the morning.”

In my mind, I imagine what the rain may have sounded like on the roof of Pa Daryl’s lean-to. Storing away such memories in our hearts, I believe, will allow us access to a stillness and peace even when we find ourselves among unsettling times.

Eden exists within us, if we remain in exile it is because we have banished ourselves.

Dr. Lauerence Kant had this to say: “Lost we wander in the wilderness trying to find an oasis, not realizing that both the wilderness and the oasis are inside us.” So, if we continue to wander in the wilderness it is of our own choosing. But, once we enter into the Promised Land, the water flowing in that land will become a Cup that we can offer to others. When will we allow the eternal waters of memory to soften and reshape the grounds of our hearts? Because only then will we discover how our hearts and homes may become an eternal Garden that offers protection and belonging to all those we encounter.

Eden can be found within us, if we allow the Divine to come near to us.

A lot of ink has been spilled on the topic of prayer. Currently, if you search Amazon Books for “Christian Prayer”, Amazon will present you with over 55,000 possible results, a number that increases to over 96,000 if you take out the word “Christian.” Everyone is interested in prayer. Many of those books share similar ideas, quote similar passages from the Bible, and give similar advice, but I think it is probably a safe assumption that within that massive list there are thousands of different definitions of prayer and thousands of different suggestions as to how we should approach God in prayer.

Given the massive amount of material available, a person could easily get lost trying to get prayer “right.” So, I would like to set those 55,000 books aside for a moment and ask a really simple, fundamental question: What is prayer?

I’m not asking for another definition. I’m asking, at the most basic level, what is it?

The entire Bible, from Genesis through Revelation, is a long story about how God pursues people. And in that story of pursuit, God is always the first to move. John stated it as clearly as anyone ever could, “We love him because he first loved us.” People are the recipients of what God has done. God creates, and we exist. God speaks, and we listen. God reveals the corruption in the world, and we confess our sin. God loves, and we are saved. God acts first.

That means that at the most fundamental level prayer is always a response. It might be a response to our sense that God is present, or it might be a response to our sense that God is absent. It might be our way of responding to his justice, his mercy, his love, or his wrath. It might be a response to the claim that he can heal us or that he can free us from our circumstances. We might even pray simply because we believe he has told us to. Regardless of our reasons for praying, genuine prayer is always a response to God.

But that leads us to another big question: What kind of a god are we responding to?

For those of us who have been Christians for a long time that may sound like a ridiculous question, but it’s an incredibly important question, because what we believe about people determines how we respond to them, and what we believe about God will determine how we pray, or if we even bother to pray at all.

Recently, an older gentlemen and I were having coffee, and he made the following suggestion: “The entire Bible is a commentary on the first three chapters of Genesis.” I agreed with him, but when it comes to questions about God, I think we should be particularly interested in the first two chapters of Genesis.

Our scripture begins with Genesis 1:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good…

Adults don’t read Genesis enough, and when we do, it’s often for the purpose of scientific debate. But if we only read these chapters when we have a problem with something scientists are telling us, we’ve missed the point. These passages are not about us. They’re not scientific treatises. They’re inspired statements about the god to whom we pray. This opening passage, in particular, is about a god who sees nothing but chaos out in front of him. There’s formlessness; everything is a void. There’s darkness everywhere. But he does something about it. He speaks, and order comes from chaos, light is produced from darkness, and the meaningless void becomes something good.

God is presented in this passage as a god of supreme power, a god who produces good things – a god who can repair the void in your life with a single word. This god, however, stands apart from his creation. He creates the universe with his voice, from a distance. As the psalms and the prophets tell us over and over again, his ways are not our ways and his thoughts are not our thoughts. He’s bigger than we are. His power extends beyond the universe, which scientists tell us is still visible from the earth 46 billion light years away. Theologians, pastors, and writers throughout history have referred to this aspect of God as his “otherness.” He’s different than we are.

I think Mr. Beaver says it best in The Chronicles of Narnia. Susan and Lucy, two of the four children who entered the enchanted land, are speaking with the Beaver family about Aslan, and they ask if he is a man:

Mr. Beaver: Aslan a man? Certainly not. I tell you, he is the king of the woods…Aslan is a lion – the lion, the great lion.

Susan: Ohhh! I’d thought he was a man. Is he quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.

Mrs. Beaver: That you will dearie, and make no mistake, if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.

Lucy: Then he isn’t safe?

Mr. Beaver: Safe? Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about being safe? Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the king, I tell you.

God is good, as the saying goes, but we should never forget that he isn’t safe, and he certainly is not a man. He’s not like us. He’s “other.” As the Celtic poet, John O’Donahue has suggested, “If we had an absolute meeting with God, our consciousness could never survive it… There is a certain sense of danger and adventure about God.” So, when we pray we are responding to a wild, untamable god who, as Isaiah told the Israelites, is higher than anything we can imagine. And practically speaking, this means that our life of prayer should be characterized by humility and reverence.

I cringe when Christians, of all people, pray like they have God figured out, like he’s a vending machine and if we punch the right numbers and drop in the right coins we get what we want. There are stories in the Bible about people who think they can tame God. Those stories never end well. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t petition God for the things we need, for healing, or for our concerns, but we should remember that God is different from us. He thinks differently than we do. He’s bigger than our church, and he’s bigger than our denomination. We could be wrong about many things. So with humility, we ought to pray as Jesus did in the garden, “Take this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but your will be done.”

If we are really humble, reverence should come easy to us in our moments of prayer. I don’t think our knees should knock every time we speak to God, but I do think we ought to respect the one to whom we are praying. Respect, of course, looks different in different cultures, and most churches today contain multiple sub-cultures that cross ethnic, regional, and age based thresholds, so reverence will not always look the same. We dress differently, act differently, and speak differently, so we will pray differently, but however we do it, we have to do it with reverence. The Apostle Paul warned the Galatians that God will not be mocked. We will reap what we sow.

Genesis 1 is powerful, but it doesn’t stand alone. Genesis 2 describes God as well:

…Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed in his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed…to till it and keep it.

The second chapter of Genesis provides us with another way to understand God. Instead of a supremely powerful, distant God who creates with his words, God and his creation are intimate in this passage. The language in this chapter suggests that we ought to use our imagination as the story is told. We imagine God scooping up the earth and carefully shaping it into a human being, exactly as he wants it to be. When his project is finished, he shares his own breath – his own life – with it. Then, he gives it a divine task. This image of God is so beautiful and so profound that Jesus echoes it in John 20 immediately following his resurrection. The disciples are still in the upper room, afraid and confused – lifeless – and just as God breathed life into mankind, so Jesus breathes purpose, meaning, life, and power into his followers. And just as God instructed the man with whom he had shared his life to tend the Garden of Eden, so Jesus instructs the people with whom he shares his life to tend to one another, as well as the broken world around them.

From this Genesis 2 perspective, God is closer to us than we are even aware. The Apostle Paul told the Colossians that all things are held together in him. And a few hundred years later, St. Augustine, the famous fourth century theologian, claimed, “God is more intimate to me than I am to myself.” God is involved. He works for us, with us, and through us. So, our life of prayer should not only be characterized by humility and reverence but also by our authentic presence and emotional conviction.

I often hear people say that we should be honest with God because he knows everything already, and I agree, but that implies we are doing all the talking, which is not how prayer really works. Sometimes we’re supposed to listen. In both cases, we have to learn how to “be present” before God. We have to learn that if we are angry or sad, God needs to be a part of that. And if we are happy and filled with excitement, God needs to be a part of that too. He has shared the breath of life with each of us, and each of us should share our life with him. This is something we have to learn and practice and discuss with one another, because we don’t do a very good job in our culture of simply being present with anything or anyone, much less with God. But Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Jesus, Paul, Peter, and many people since them knew how, and it changed their lives.

If we are authentic and present in our life of prayer, our emotional conviction will come naturally. Before I became better acquainted with charismatic Christians, I was highly critical of “emotionalism”, as many people are today. And I still think that it can become dangerously self satisfying, but I have also learned that emotional conviction is important. Our feelings can deceive us, but they are powerful motivators and a central part of who we are in any given moment. I believe an intimate creator would wish for his creation to embrace emotional experiences with him, but like reverence, how that happens will vary from person to person, so we have to give one another other plenty of room to let it happen the way it needs to happen.

If we take Genesis 1 and 2 seriously, the god that we respond to is farther away than we can ever imagine but closer than we can ever know. He’s supremely powerful but intricately forming us. There’s a mystery about him, a paradox. And it is this paradox that makes God everything we’ve ever needed him to be. There’s nothing wrong with books about prayer. There’s a little book called Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton that I read every couple of years and another book called The Art of Prayer by Igumen Chariton that I’m working through. They’re encouraging and useful. But, they aren’t necessary. I often tell my students that if they want to approach something the right way, they need to understand it the right way. And I believe that if we keep the god of Genesis 1 and 2 before us, then we will naturally approach him with humility, reverence, our authentic presence, and emotional conviction. I believe we will each be approaching God as he would have us approach him.

Like most Christians, I rarely open the book of Leviticus. It’s full of rules and regulations. It’s a book of technicalities. Until recently, I probably couldn’t name one Christian who would brew a hot cup of coffee, flip on his favorite worship play list, and then read through the property laws from ancient Hebrew society. It’s not the sort of book we enjoy. But some time ago I had a conversation with Michael Card, and now I can name at least one.

If you’re in your twenties or thirties you probably don’t know who Michael Card is, but your parents may have loved his worship music. On the other hand, they may have loved it so much that they wore his cassette tapes out listening to his hit song, El Shadai, as mine did. My parents played his music all the time; I even remember listening to Michael Card on our family camping trips.

Michael Card was a permanent member of my internal jukebox from the 80’s, and that’s probably why I was never a big fan. But then I met the man at one of my school’s chapels, and now I am tempted to convince my church to have him up for a concert just so I can take him out for coffee afterwards. That’s one of the first things I learned about him in our conversation; he loves good coffee. Not just Starbucks, he said, – “good coffee.” And where coffee is concerned, money is no object. That’s exactly what he told me. Then, he told me a story. In the story, he and Keith Green, another Christian artist your parents may have loved, were at a party where there were lots of rough individuals, and by the end of it, Keith Green was in a car with a pretty scary drug dealer, trying to convince him that there was a better way to live life.

That’s when I was really hooked. Not only was I chatting about coffee with one of my parents’ favorite Christian artists, a man who had been a regular part of my family’s long drives and rain soaked camping vacations in the Smokey Mountains, but I was becoming convinced that he was, in fact, a Christian artist – the kind that cares about Jesus’ perspective more than he cares about other people’s perspectives. For Michael Card, Jesus stands at the center of it all. Oh, and its worth mentioning that it takes a pretty cool guy to wear jeans and a t-shirt to a Presbyterian chapel. And he had an awesome beard.

After our conversation, Michael (I’m pretty sure we were on a first name basis by then.) did his thing. He played all of my parents’ old favorites. There were points when I actually thought I was sitting in my family’s old station wagon heading down I-75 toward Tennessee, the mountains growing larger in front of us and my dad threatening to pull over and spank me for punching my sister while the rest of the family was trying to listen to El Shadai.

But at some point in that short Presbyterian chapel, Michael began commenting on another famous song, Jubilee. Nostalgia had been working on me, and I was daydreaming about the mountains, but when he began citing a passage from Leviticus 25, I began to listen a little more closely, because I was pretty sure I had never seen a worship leader crack open the bible and encourage a congregation to worship with ancient Hebrew property regulations.

He spoke for a moment. Then he sang:

The Lord provided for a time

For the slaves to be set free

For the debts to all be cancelled

So his chosen ones could see

His deep desire was for forgiveness

He longed to see their liberty

And his yearning was embodied

In the Year of Jubilee

Once again, this man had intrigued me. I grabbed my phone, recorded a note to take a closer look at Leviticus 25, and let myself drift back to the Smokey Mountains.

As I later discovered, the passage in Leviticus is part of the Holiness Code, supposedly given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. The passage contains a set of regulations that were to be observed by all levels of ancient Israelite society. It was a celebration that rolled around every 50 years or so called the Year of Jubilee.

Jubilee literally means “trumpet,” after the instrument that was designated to announce its opening. “Have the trumpet sounded everywhere…sound the trumpet throughout the land” (25:9). The name itself is significant, because at that time trumpets were not used for musical purposes much at all. They were primarily used in military and religious ceremonies, and they invoked a certain sense of attention and respect. They were public proclamations that something very significant, probably life altering, was getting ready to take place. The book of Exodus, for example, tells us that “the voice of a trumpet” was heard amid the thunder and lighting on Sinai when God met with Moses, and it caused the people to tremble. Trumpets were also used when the Ark of the Covenant was returned after being captured, when Jericho was destroyed, when there were victories in battle, when kings were anointed, and when the temple was dedicated. The sound of a trumpet was a signal that everyday life was about to change – that it must change.

So, the Jubilee was actually a time of celebration that God used to announce to all of his people that it was time for their lives to change. And thankfully, God did not let his people decide for themselves what changes they needed to make. He made it very clear. Leviticus 25 contains a detailed list of the things that must be done during this celebration, and they can generally be boiled down to three dominant themes: freedom, return, and forgiveness.

The ancient Israelite economy, like most all ancient civilizations of that time, was heavily influenced by slavery. Slaves could be attained any number of ways, and in most of the world, slavery was a permanent condition. For the Greeks and the Romans, for example, slaves could be set free by their masters or they could purchase their freedom, but most of the time, slaves remained slaves for life. But that is not what God desired for his people. They were not to remain slaves, nor possess one another as slaves permanently. The people were instructed, “Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants” (v. 10). One of the conditions of the Jubilee was a complete emancipation, a complete proclamation of freedom throughout the land.

Another theme that dominates all of Leviticus 25 is the theme of return. “In the year of jubilee everyone is to return to his own property” (v. 13). For the Israelite civilization, which was largely agricultural, the specific form of return to which God called them was to their ancestral lands and farms. People were supposed to move back to where they came from. They were supposed to reconnect with the land of their family heritage. But for them, a return to ancestral property represented much more than a change in location. It was not simply an opportunity to pack up and move. The Israelites associated their land with their relationship with God and the covenant God made with their forefathers. For example, God told Abraham, “I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant…The whole land of Canaan where you are now an alien, I will give you as an everlasting possession, to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God” (Gen 17: 7-8). For the Israelites, words such as: God, land, presence, blessing, tradition, family, heritage, and salvation were all related to one another. They were not interchangeable, but in the minds of the ancient Israelites, they occurred together. So, a second condition of the Jubilee was that the people should return, not just to their land, but to God, to the traditions of their ancestors, to the way God intended things to be.

Finally, having been commanded to proclaim freedom and return, the Israelites were to practice forgiveness. In the Jubilee this primarily took the form of the forgiveness of financial debt. “If one of your countrymen becomes poor and is unable to support himself among you, help him as you would an alien or a temporary resident, so he can continue to live among you. Do not take interest of any kind from him…he is to work for you until the year of jubilee” (v. 35-40). In a society where debt could lead to oppression, God offered his people a way out, a light at the end of the tunnel. But God’s insistence that his people’s debt be forgiven in the Jubilee was not the only way he protected them. Leviticus 25 lists many different ways someone’s debt may be ‘redeemed’, even if the jubilee year had not yet arrived. “If one of your countrymen becomes poor…he retains the right of redemption…a relative may redeem him…any blood relative may redeem him…but if he is not redeemed in any of these ways, he and his children are to be released in the jubilee year” (v. 47-55). Redeem means “to gain or regain possession of”, and God expected the Israelites to redeem one another, especially those with family ties. He expected them to work hard and to sacrifice in order to free one another of their debts and the things that oppressed them, even if it was costly.

If we step back for a moment and look at the bigger picture, we can imagine what a beautiful moment we would be witnessing if we saw an entire nation of people proclaiming freedom, return, and forgiveness. The trumpet blasts would echo across Israelite territory – through the crowded city of Jerusalem and out into the countryside beyond. Parents, broken beneath insurmountable debt would cling to one another and praise God for his provision. Children, living in terrible, oppressive conditions would erupt into the streets singing the songs of their ancestors. The evening meals would be taken with gratitude and thanksgiving. Fathers would slaughter the fatted calf and mothers would serve the best wine. Entire villages would dance and laugh together. And they would bless the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who commanded Moses to rescue them from slavery, the God who brought them safely through the waters of the sea.

It’s a wonderful image isn’t it? But it gets even better.

There was a prophet named Isaiah, and he believed there would be a day when this celebration of freedom would not belong to the Israelites alone but to every nation, to every person from one side of the world to the other. He believed there would be a day when God would extend his peace and his love, his shalom, to the entire world. And here is the interesting part: he believed that when this happened, that celebration would occur in the form of a person. This ancient tradition of freedom, return, and forgiveness would no longer just be an Israelite festival rolling around every 50 years or so. Instead, freedom and forgiveness would exist in the form of a living, breathing person.

Isaiah called this person the ‘Servant of God’. He was convinced that this person would be anointed by God to accomplish a specific task, and he believed that this person’s task would be to set things right in the world again. Isaiah said that God’s spirit would be upon this servant in an incredibly special way. He said this person would be determined and strong, that he would be unstoppable, that he wouldn’t rest until justice and peace had been established on earth. This servant would be a symbol of all Israel, but he would be a light to all the nations. He would open the eyes of the blind and he would set the prisoners free. His very existence would be the proclamation of the year of God’s favor (42:1-7). The Servant of God would be a perpetual, living Jubilee, a celebration that would cross oceans and seas, deserts and mountains, political ideologies, language barriers, ethnicities, philosophical differences, intellectual disputes, and cultural norms. This person would be a Jubilee for everyone.

And we know the rest of the story, don’t we?

Hundreds of years after Isaiah, a man came from one of the poorer regions around Jerusalem, and he began teaching in local synagogues – just the small ones – but it was enough for him to build a reputation and get himself invited to speak at the larger synagogue in a town called Nazareth. There, he opened Isaiah’s scroll and found one of the more famous passages about the Servant of God. Then he read:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Lk 4:18-19).

We are told that he finished the reading, rolled up the scroll, handed it back to the synagogue official, and simply took his seat. So, people began whispering. They already knew that passage by heart. It had been read to them hundreds, perhaps thousands of times. Was this all he was going to say, this man whom they had heard so much about?

But he wasn’t finished, not even close.

“Today,” he told them, “this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” This man from Nazareth was claiming to be the Servant of God, the one who would proclaim Isaiah’s world wide Jubilee. Everywhere he went he preached those same themes: freedom, return, and forgiveness. He acquired a following, people that wanted to help him. And he told those people to free the poor and the helpless, to be a light so others could return to God, and to forgive as many times as they needed to along the way. As Isaiah had believed, this man from Nazareth healed people, raised the dead, cast out demons, and destroyed all kinds of oppression. He was powerful, determined, and strong. Nothing, not even death, could stop him from his world wide mission of Jubilee.

This is the Gospel, and it’s not just good news; it’s the best news possible! So, I wish we could stop right now and celebrate God’s Jubilee and worship the Servant of God. But there is one more really important point.

Before he played the song, Jubilee, Michael made a casual comment in that Presbyterian chapel service that has not left me since. In fact, I would say it has changed everything for me. He said that there is no biblical, historical, or archaeological evidence that the ancient Israelites ever fully practiced the Jubilee. And, having done some investigation, it seems like most scholars agree with him. Apparently, the Israelites talked a lot about the Jubilee. They even used it to help measure time. For hundreds of years, their religious leaders argued about it, wrote books about it, and studied it. They talked about its symbolism, its meaning, and its theology. They read about it publicly. The people memorized it, hoped for it, and longed for it. But they didn’t actually do it. God had commanded his people to follow a straightforward list of laws that would revolutionize their own hearts and their entire society. The laws were a compulsory invitation to experience God’s blessings for his people, a way for them to take the advice of the Psalmist – to taste and see that the Lord is good. But they didn’t do it, because it was too impractical. It would have cost them too much. It would have elevated the lowly members of society and humbled the proud. Unlikely individuals would have stood alongside the successful, the wealthy, the moral, and, by the standards of those days, the righteous. Freedom, return, and forgiveness would have altered the entire world that the Israelites had built, but it was the world that they had built around themselves, so they wouldn’t do it.

Typically, this would be the point when good Christians who know their bible and their systematic theology would say, “Of course they didn’t do it. Those Israelites never got anything right. But it was all part of the plan anyway. Now we believe in Jesus!”

We believe in Jesus? What do we mean when we say we believe in Jesus?

Let’s rephrase the question: What does it mean to believe in a man who claimed to be committed to freedom, return, and forgiveness?

Jesus said amazing things like: “Love your neighbor as yourself,” “When you give a cup of cold water to the least of these you do it for me,” and “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall see God.” Did he really mean all of that stuff about making peace and seeing God, or was it just nice talk? What does it mean to believe in a man who says things like that?

Jesus did amazing things. He fed the masses, healed the sick, and raised the dead. He died for the world. But he told his followers that they would do even greater things than that. So, have you raised anyone from the dead lately? What does it mean to believe in a man who does things like that?

The Apostle Paul and many of the other early followers of Jesus taught their churches that belief in Jesus was not just an idea but an actual agreement to be his hands and his feet. They agreed to be his body, his presence among the brokenhearted, the blind, and the oppressed. They would partner in his Jubilee mission. The problem is: followers of Jesus are often a lot like the ancient Israelites. We spend a lot of time arguing about Jesus, writing books about Jesus, studying Jesus, memorizing Jesus, hoping for Jesus, publicly preaching Jesus, and even personally longing for Jesus, but sometimes his mission is strangely absent. So, I’ll ask again. Have you raised anyone from the dead lately? Have you even tried?

I know people who are trying. I know a girl who is obsessed with combating the child slave trade that is creeping into the U.S. I know an older gentleman with a PhD who teaches for pennies at a local business college, because he is passionate about helping his students return to the love of God. He teaches Business Writing, but he always tells me his real mission is restoration. Recently, I spoke with a young person who wanted to make people more aware of the growing rate of teen suicide. I know people in medicine, business, legal professions, education, and all kinds of other careers who see their real mission as freedom, return, and forgiveness. The mission looks different for each of them, and they aren’t physically raising people from the dead, but they aren’t afraid of being impractical either.

My prayer is that we won’t sacrifice the real world aspect of our mission simply because it’s impractical, costly, or because we have built a church culture and put ourselves at the center of it. If we do, we will miss out on the blessings of renewed, spirit filled hearts and a changed society.

Mountains, rivers, and trees. Individual elements of Earth that each have roots, yet whose systems intertwine. Ancient snow-capped stone with foundations that reach warmth below, underground tributaries whose waters gather in the dark and emerge into the light; kind waters offering a drink to all who thirst… and leaves green with life, rustling in the wind, whilst wooden fingers travel deep the mire (around stone, in search of water) to anchor the existence of growth above.

I suppose the human person is most like a tree, we have life and we experience growth, but we have nothing, no physical extension to hold us firm in place. Our blood and ancestry can sometimes lead us to places where we discover belonging. Memory, however, is our truest anchor and will hold us near our Source.

There is a mountain beneath our souls and within the blood of our veins a river of life. What shall our hands create and bring forth into the light? Our memories are collections of what we will become; what we choose to remember gathers in the dark and what we imagine will pool into the light. The cup we offer to those who thirst will become the purest existence we have, here. Kind water for parched lips… eternal love that washes over the soul.

Each loving act a new memory -roots that hold us firm.

How exited was I to learn of the new Star Wars movies that are now in production? I will not answer that question in full for fear of being labeled more a dork than my friends have previously suspected. But, I will say, I was exited enough that when the notion crossed my mind at three in the morning I was compelled to jump out of bed and compose a few thoughts about why I like these films so much. I suppose the reason I connect with this story so intently (apart from the fact that the original three Star Wars films are woven into so many great childhood memories) is because stories such as these give us the opportunity to explore the mystery of an “Other” world.

Through the looking glass of an adult perspective certain details come to light that my young mind had not a glimpse of. It is amazing to me that in a galaxy far, far away there exist a people not so different from you and I -granted some that are stranger looking! Still, at the very heart of this series there is a battle between good and evil; a space odyssey that introduces us to a cast of peculiar characters. Yet, beyond outward appearances, these tales acquaint us with attributes that ultimately define each character as either hero or villain. I could not help myself when I was out shopping the other day and found a retro, Star Wars, metal lunch box… I just had to buy it for my son’s third birthday! On front of the box was the central crew of the “Rebel Alliance”, a group in shimmering white clothing crowded around the humble Luke Skywalker. Looming in the background of the cases front (over the shoulder of Skywalker) were the dark images of the DEATH STAR (a symbol of the destruction of all that is good in the world) and the haunting face of one Darth Vader.

Darth Vader is the evil commander of the much larger “Galactic Empire”, an empire bent on the destruction of all that oppose its power. For me, the greatness of this tale lies in Luke’s journey to discover “The Force”, the invisible fabric that transcends space and time and that interconnects all of life. While on his own path of self-discovery Luke acts as a servant-leader, leading the small rebel force (a remnant of good people left in the galaxy) to rally against the eminent total-eclipse of evil. Yet, a penumbral light is becoming visible… A New Hope.

Alright, at this point if you know these movies and did not like them you are thinking “Wow, what a nerd!”. On the other hand if you did like them you are probably ready to wipe the dust off your collection and watch them straight through!! For those of you who do not know much about these films, let me take a moment to commend the creative genius of George Lucas (the creator of the film series). Lucas cleverly created a very captivating story that would be divided into numerous (nine, or possibly even twelve) movies. A strategy of filming parts/episodes 4, 5, and 6 first was the genius idea. George Lucas was the Writer and Director for the first film (Episode IV) and was involved in the writing on Episodes V and VI. Not knowing how many films he would actually end up producing or if parts 1, 2, and 3 (or 7, 8, 9, ect.) would ever come into being… it turned out that Episode I, Episode II, and Episode III were eagerly and anxiously awaited by fans and were not released until 16 years after the filming of Episode VI (the third film.) Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope was released in 1977 (most well known as simply Star Wars) and some people don’t even recognize it under its sub title of “A New Hope”. I wonder if George Lucas knew at that time what he had given birth to?! The sequel to the first film, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back has been argued by film critics to be one of the best sequels to a movie ever, in the history of cinema!!

One of my childhood favorites, and the final film in the original trilogy is Star Wars Episode VI: The Return of the Jedi. The third film was released in 1983, which landed it’s release just two years after I was born and very near my childhood years. I count it a blessing that my young mind could have been enriched by such imaginative stories. As a young adult, I also thoroughly enjoyed the prequel trilogy (including Episodes I-III, that George Lucas served as both writer and director for) and because so many other people feel the same, what a franchise George Lucas has created! The Walt Disney Company just last year (in October 2012) purchased Lucasfilm and paid over 4 billion dollars for it!! Disney wasted no time announcing that they plan to make three new Star Wars films starting with Episode VII that is scheduled for release in 2015!!!

Here is a funny story that my father loves telling on himself. My father is the eldest of four boys and there is a ten year age difference between himself and his youngest brother, Philip. When he and my mother were newly married, they took Phil to the movies and guess what was playing… the first STAR WARS. From looking at the movie poster my father assumed it would be a kid-friendly selection (which it is), but after seeing the film he was personally not very impressed. Trailing Philip on the way back to the car my father leaned in to my mother’s ear and uttered the epic words “Well… that movie isn’t going to amount to much!”. My father admits today that he had never been so wrong!! Clearly his son agrees, as I continue to sing the praises of these stories.

I just love the idea that in our own world a spiritual world exists just below the surface of what we can see with our eyes. Sometimes we have difficulty encountering this Other world, but the invisible world-of-spirit is always most visible through the goodness and kind acts of others. There are many characters who play a role in helping us along our path of spiritual discovery: Jedi in white clothing, evil Siths with black hearts and my personal favorite… the real folks that belong to the fray -authentic people like Han Solo that inhabit the grey zone but deep down are attracted to the light.

If you have not had the privilege of watching these films, there is hope yet… it still amazes me how well the special effects that Lucas pioneered have contributed to the enduring quality of the original three movies (films as relevant today as when they were released over thirty years ago.) If you do not know what being a “Jedi” is all about, or have not made the acquaintance of Yoda, there is time yet. Or “time yet, there is” if you prefer! I would personally recommend watching the original trilogy first, before viewing Episodes I, II, and III. Watching the trilogies in the “reverse” order will spoil some of the mystery. Who knows, you may even become as excited as I am for the next chapters in this galactic adventure.

After watching the first three films, if nothing else, you will at least be able to laugh at some of the Star Wars anecdotes that are riddled throughout our pop-culture. When a child is wearing a shirt that says “The Force is strong with this one”… you will laugh! When you read an article or hear someone flip their speech patterns (“time yet, there is” for example) you will chuckle. When you see a child walking into their kindergarten class with a Star Wars lunch box it may bring a smile to your face. My hope for you is deeper however. While I was researching the original film release-dates I was reading on WOOKIEPEDIA and saw that the Jedi were described as “mystical warriors”. I believe our world would do well with a few more Jedi… I believe that A New Hope may just lie in the hearts of such warriors!

Wisdom often appears in the oddest places, that is, if one is paying attention. Katy Perry, sex symbol and pop star, was quickly elevated to the status of popular sensation after her hit single, “I kissed a girl,” was released in 2008. Obviously, the song’s sensual character shocked many listeners, enticed others, but demanded the intrigue and attention of everyone. With Perry’s reputation preceding her, she then released her chart topping album, Teenage Dream in 2010, which included the hit singles “California Gurls,” “Teenage Dream,” and “Firework.” In the eyes of the public and critics alike, the last of these has seemed to stand out. “Firework” sold more than half a million digital copies in the U.S. alone, and has been described as a powerful self esteem anthem on more than one occasion. In addition to the positive reviews, Perry says that the song is her favorite on the record and ultimately what she wants to communicate to her fans. As she says, “It’s a bit like my, um… opus, I guess you could say.”^[1] , 2010. Although there are a lot of singles each year that are praised by both the masses and their artists, there does seem to be something special about “Firework.”

Aside from the catchy melody and rhythm, this chart-topper’s lyrical message raises issues concerning subtle and deep types of human experience, experiences many people would relate to if they actually sat down for a moment and gave their own emotions, thoughts, and feelings some attention. In a curious, but slightly rhetorical tone, Perry opens her song with a series of three questions:

Do you ever feel like a plastic bag
Drifting through the wind
Wanting to start again
Do you ever feel so paper thin,
Like a house of cards
One blow from caving in
Do you ever feel already buried deep
Six feet under scream
But no one seems to hear a thing

Perry’s questions correspond to three negative life experiences, and her use of visual imagery and metaphor is anything but subtle. The first question invites the listener to reflect on whether or not he feels like life is moving in a particular, purposeful direction. The image of a drifting plastic bag is actually a profound and appropriately contemporary analogy to the tumbleweed, often depicted rolling through ghost towns and deserts in the Old Western milieu. Tumbleweeds are simply dead plants, and once they are sufficiently dried out they break off their stalks and roll around aimlessly, blowing wherever the wind takes them. This meaningless movement is, unfortunately, a characteristic experience for a person who feels like he is simply drifting through life. At some point such a person would even lose interest in even an attempt at self control, simply allowing the circumstances of life to push him from place to place.

The visual imagery of the second question presents Perry’s listener with a paper thin person. His central experience is lack of depth or complexity. The imagery is arguably similar to Lewis Carroll’s famous characters from Alice in Wonderland, the Queen’s Court members, who are literally depicted as playing cards. For the Queen, of course, these paper-thin subjects are highly disposable. Who can forget the famous line, “Off with their heads!” As Perry suggests, they do easily collapse, or “cave in” when the wind of the plot blows them over. These characters hardly exhibit any internal complexity – a dissatisfaction for sympathetic audiences, but there is something infinitely more tragic about real individuals who perceive their own lives to only be similar, paper-thin predicaments.

Finally, the previous two questions culminate in a slightly morbid burial metaphor, which implies that living individuals ought to feel alive, not “already buried deep.” The subject in this case, however, is not death, but solitude or loneliness. The tragic element of the question is that the listener is screaming for help, but his attempt to attract attention is futile. It is this unheeded cry for help that creates the experience of being buried alive, separated from everyone else. Perry seems to imply that meaningful life experiences are accompanied by relationships and clear communication with others. Of course, individuals who suffer from an affirmative response to Perry’s initial questions will also probably find meaningful relationships difficult, and from “six feet under,” experience intense solitude.

Although “Firework’s” three questions correspond to different experiences in life, they are united by one dominant theme, emptiness. A person feels like a drifter when he is emptied of direction, and paper-thin when he is emptied of complexity. He feels “buried deep” when life seems to be emptied of meaningful relationships.^[2] Taken in isolation, Perry’s negative theme seems rather bleak. Luckily, Perry does not abandon her hurting audience to these dark, existential questions. Instead, the music builds through the bridge, and creates vital anticipation as the song quickly moves away from the pessimism of the verse, and toward a powerful optimism in the chorus:

Do you know that there’s still a chance for you,
Cause there’s a spark in you
You just gotta ignite the light
And let it shine
Just own the night
Like the Fourth of July
Cause baby you’re a firework.
Come on show ’em what you’re worth
Make ’em go “Oh, oh, oh!”
As you shoot across the sky

At this point, the song’s actual message becomes clear. It is indeed a self-esteem anthem, but not the heroic type that encourages individuals to simply trudge through their problems. The opening question of the chorus quickly overcomes all the negative rhetoric of the verse. The question, “Do you know that there’s still a chance for you, cause there’s a spark in you?” implies that the listener has only been deceived by his experiences of emptiness. Perry does not seem to be suggesting that the negative experiences themselves are fake, false, or insignificant; what is false is the negative worldview and unnecessarily harsh self-evaluation they create.

According to “Firework,” a human being cannot be emptied of meaning. Each person contains at least a “spark” that is present whether he is aware of it or not, and the ignition of this spark begins a highly transformative process. The speed with which the music builds in this portion of the song artistically suggests that this process may occur rapidly, with a significant amount of power. According to the lyrics, it is accompanied by a strong sense of intrinsic value and entitlement, just as the Fourth of July, a powerful national symbol, is entitled to “own the night.” It is also a highly visible process. People cannot help but notice an enlightened individual who “shoots across the sky”; they become astonished. Their only response is to go “Oh, Oh, Oh!” the lyrical equivalent to utter confusion and amazement. How could a person’s peers avoid marveling at such a change in their friend, coworker, or family member?

Given Perry’s reputation in pop culture, there is a temptation to overlook the significance and relevance of her “opus.” A very similar message, however, runs throughout the work of the late contemplative, John O’Donahue. The world lost this Celtic poet in 2008, but he spent many years of his life intentionally pointing people toward meaning, friendship, beauty, and value in religious, artistic, and even business-corporate settings. O’Donahue’s life was characterized by prayer, meditation, reflection, and genuine interest in service to others, goals which culminated in one of his most well known works, Anam Cara.^[3] Throughout the book, O’Donahue claims that people tend to experience cynicism and emptiness because they often overlook a great, internal significance that is always available:

“If we become addicted to the external, our interiority will haunt us… If you attend to yourself, and seek to come into your presence, you will find exactly the right rhythm for your own life… If you focus your longing on a faraway divinity, you put an unfair strain on your longing. Thus it often happens that your longing reaches out toward the distant divine, but because it overstrains itself, it bends back to become cynicism, emptiness, or negativity. This can destroy your sensibility. Yet we do not need to put any strain whatever on our longing.”^[4]

Although O’Donohue’s poetic, spiritual language differs from Perry’s popular, lyrical expression, the thematic parallels are undeniable.^[5] The reader longs for meaning and fullness, but typically he seeks meaning in faraway places or external goals that are too difficult to obtain in daily life, and so, his longing remains dissatisfied. Slowly, a negative, cynical worldview begins to cloud his mind, not because it is necessary or true, but because his perspective has become distorted. For O’Donohue, humans long for divinity, but divinity is incredibly close, its expression is internal and foundational, part of what it means to be human in the first place. He illustrates his point beautifully in a poem that certainly deserves a full reading:

Beannacht

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.^[6]

Beannacht means “blessing” – something everyone needs when life feels like “dead weight,” ” frozen eyes behind gray windows,” or “black stains in the ocean.” The hope of O’Donohue’s blessing is twofold. The first portion of the poem suggests that hope has an internal source. He frequently uses clay as a visual image to emphasize the earthy, but majestic identity of human beings. “We need to remain in rhythm with our inner clay voice and longing. Yet this voice is no longer audible in the modern world. We are not even aware of our loss.”^[7] In the first stanza of Beannacht, it is this lost inner voice that is capable of bringing balance back to a distorted experience, and in the second stanza the vibrancy of awakened internal colors and light allow the blessed to experience a life of peace and joy.

The second portion of the poem suggests that hope has external sources as well, but these are all still intimately related to the internal clay voice. For instance, they are all natural sources: moonlight, earth, ocean, and ancestors.^[8] In addition, O’Donohue implies that external hope processes to the location of the blessed, as opposed to the blessed setting off on a strenuous journey in search for it. The reader is not told exactly what propels this external hope, whether it moves naturally or is sent by a higher power, but the moonlight approaches horizontally, bringing direction and purpose from “across the waters,” the earth approaches from beneath and “nourishes” hope, and the light is an encompassing, clarifying power that makes experiences sensible.

Although it is probably the case that human beings have always struggled with the sort of self-attentiveness prescribed in Anam Cara and the negative experiences expressed in Beannacht, O’Donohue is certainly correct to point out that the modern world makes it increasingly difficult to attend to these deep problems. The speed with which modern technologically driven days move makes it nearly impossible to sit and be attentive, and most folks today are indeed so alienated from the depth of the natural world that they hardly even consider that there might be intimate blessings to be found there. No one, therefore, should be surprised when messages such as Perry’s are met with great enthusiasm in American pop-culture. They touch a deep yearning. A significant portion of the American population struggles with emptiness, ill-communication, darkness, meaninglessness, and fear. Everyone from philosophers to biologists seem to be searching for the value and meaning of life. Anxiety and depression, clinical versions of these issues, are on the rise. Hurting individuals want answers, and will even settle for suggestions. Artists such as Katy Perry and John O’Donohue provide just that. Generally speaking, they encourage their audience to adopt a method of turning inward for hope. From this perspective, meaning, value, and hope are not circumstantial; they are intrinsically present at all times. They are intricately woven into the tapestry of the human person.

A lot of folks, especially many religious folks, tend to disapprove of the suggestion that hurting individuals ought to turn inward in search of hope. In particular, Christians often seem as if they might even fear the concept. To these offended ears, discussion of an internal spark is at best fruitless or theologically confused. At worst, such discussion is perceived as idolatrous and heretical.^[9] Pop stars and Celtic poets may speak their minds, but in the end, their romantic ideals are too often trumped by the determination of the closed-minded. So, the prescription for a hurting individual is not to attend to himself, but to attend to religious services and volunteer ministries, to spend more time simply asking God about direction and guidance, and to more consistently participate in financial giving – all quantitative remedies driven by external circumstances. If this truly is the modern Christian approach, then Christians have lost sight of a historically subtle, but deep and long standing tradition of introspection that is probably more in line with the pop artists and the hopeless romantics.

For a Christian, precedence for an internal source of hope appears early in the biblical tradition, but is hardly discussed at all in many Christian congregations. This might be because it appears in conspicuous places in the scripture or because it might sound dangerously individualistic; maybe it is simply too vague and esoteric to be relevant to most readers. In any case, it appears in the book of Deuteronomy following the proclamation of divine law, which is directly related to experiencing a meaningful life. “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendents may live… “(Deut 30:19, NRSV). The life giving law, as it is laid out throughout Deuteronomy, is a daunting list of externally driven regulations, but the Lord is quick to encourage the Israelites that choosing life is possible precisely because there is a powerful internal element to the Lord’s life giving words:

“Surely this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, “Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?” Neither is it beyond the sea that you should say, “Who will cross the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?” No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe” (Deut 30:11-14, Italics Mine).

Several hundred years later the Apostle Paul re-applied the same idea to Christian faith. Writing about the revelation of Christ in the first century CE, he exhorts the church at Rome, “But what does it say? ‘The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart’ (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim)…For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.” (Rom 10:8-10). Scholars and systematic theologians may debate the technical, theological implications of both of these passages, but there is simply no denying that these sacred scriptures generally present a pattern of meaning that, in practice, flows from the internal to the external, from the heart to the mouth, from the depths to the shallows of human experience.

As the centuries passed, this biblical tradition may have reached its height of practical application with the ancient Christians who are today referred to as the Desert Fathers. Although many Christian authorities in the second and third centuries were highly occupied with administrative and theological debates, the Desert Fathers were desperate to preserve Christianity as a spiritual, practical experience. “In solitude they made careful observations…they talked about their thoughts and feelings, about their concrete way of life, and about their path to God.”^[10] Highly influential ancient Christians such as Antony and Pachomios believed strongly that the first significant step toward a meaningful life was attending to the depth of the self with honesty and humility. As the famous fourth century Christian, Evagrius Ponticus, stated, “If you want to know God, learn to know yourself first!” Isaac of Nineveh, a seventh century theologian who spent more time contemplating love, prayer, humility, and faith than rigid church programs and lofty ideals, may have said it best, “Strive to enter the treasure chamber that is within you; that way you will see the heavenly treasure… The ladder to the kingdom of heaven is hidden in your soul.”^[11]

This ancient focus has become increasingly popular in both scholarly and public circles in recent decades as both religious and non-religious folks continue to struggle with the same contemporary problems. As Anslem Gruen, a Christian monk and scholar from Germany, has pointed out, “Psychologists are taking an interest in the experiences of the early monks, in their methods of observing and dealing with thoughts and feelings. They sense that this isn’t mere talk about humans and God, that the monks’ words come from sincere self-knowledge and real experience of God.”^[12] In addition, this spiritual method, however ambiguous its theological particulars might be, in practice, can be traced to many contemporary Christian authors such as Thomas Merton and George Maloney, whose works also emphasize self-attentiveness, meditation, personal prayer, and devotion, and have, not coincidentally, been widely received by the public. The systematized, externally driven prescription for hurting individuals that is so often prescribed by many modern Christians is simply too often a temporary answer for deeper questions.

Cynics, especially Protestants and Evangelicals, may certainly criticize the theological implications of turning inward for hope, but an honest Christian cannot ignore the fact that his own world is full of hurting individuals and sincere questions about the fullness or emptiness of life. In these moments, a purely intellectual faith may be too shaky.^[13] Experiences of emptiness pervade modern culture and create false realities. There is a tremendous amount of wisdom in the suggestion that folks begin a journey of self-discovery. The discovery will demonstrate that the most meaningful experiences possible are closer than anyone can intellectually imagine, hidden away from the distortions of all the false realities, deep in the recesses of the soul. As Gruen would claim, “There is something that wants to come alive, to bloom.”^[14] It is no coincidence that this wisdom surfaces in all sorts of artistic material, even in the music of best selling pop stars whose work is often saturated with crudely explicit content. It is also no coincidence that when it does surface the public gravitates to it. Perry may or may not have any sort of systematic or logical beliefs to support her ideas,^[15] and she may not have put this much thought into her opus, but the positive message in “Firework” has obviously been exposed to millions of listeners, and for that, credit is due.

[1] Katy Perry, www.katyperry.com/katy-perry-talks-firework/

[2] Emptiness continues to be a characteristic theme in the remainder of the song, “You don’t have to feel like a waste of space… ” (Verse 2).

[3] Literally, “Soul Friend”.

[4] John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, (Harper Collins Publisher, 1998), xvi-59. Italics mine.

[5] In place of “spark,” for example, the former uses “divinity,” and in place of “ignite” the reader is told to “attend.”

[6] O’Donohue, Epigraph.

[7] Ibid., 2.

[8] The last of these might also be considered an internal source.

[9] It might also be added that in such discussions many Christians would throw around terms such as “mystical” and “New Age” really having no idea what those terms actually mean or represent.

[10] Anselm Gruen, Heaven Begins Within You: Wisdom from the Desert Fathers, trans. Peter Heinegg, The Crossroad Publishing Company, New York, 1999, 11.

[11] Ibid., 21.

[12] Ibid., 7. Italics Mine.

[13] It is important to keep in mind that what is being suggested here is a type of spiritual method and practice, not particular beliefs. In practice, Christians are often far too occupied with external conditions such as visible, measurable accomplishments to give any authentic attention to their own condition and needs.

[14] Ibid., 25.

[15] For instance, Perry does not seem to make any suggestions about the origin of the spark in “Firework.” Is the spark purely a humanistic concept or does it imply something divinely other, as it does with the ancient Christians and other similar religious individuals? The lack of information may or may not be intentional. The song’s lyrics are brief, and many influential songs revel in brevity.