phil blogs

being ornamental

2012-02-08T11:40:00.001Z

[I would, as ever, earnestly love to have your feedback, thoughts and counter-theologies]

[Apologies:
- This is a completely unbloggable piece of writing, if you would prefer it as a pdf do email me and I can offer it in a more intuitive format.
- The sketchbook cuttings with which I break up this gargantuan column of text are unrelated to adjacent bits of writing.
- I coin phrases, frequently without justification or explanation. This is the most frequent criticism I recieve, along with long sentences, failed syllogisms and generally erratic clauses.. So to try to preempt that coining complaints: Religiose and religione are pejorative to describe the attitude and faith of the self-righteous, 'religion' would also cover the damage done that I wish to convey, but it comes with too much baggage. Nuditism, differs from nudism as scientism differs from science, it is explicitly a belief in the saving power of the thing. Aedicule is not my coinage, but a real word applied to architecture by Summerson to speak of the phenomenon of the miniature. Angelological, also a real word, describing the study of angels.]

Being Ornamental: On the motive forces of an ornamental world view and why we disornament

“Lack of Ornament is sign of spiritual strength” (Loos, p21)

Prompted by the enduring criminalisation of ornament, this essay would like to explore ornament's presuppositions in the hope of arriving at such an alternative as might render ornament possible, meaningful and delightful. It intends to speak of the noumenal/phenomenal dualism, which ultimately precludes ornament, as a dualism begetting and begotten by a solipsistic, disembodied and religiose mode of being towards reality: a mode emerging subtly in the work of Ruskin, to a clarity in Semper and triumphalistically in Loos. Analogically, in this dualism, ornament is the optimistic veil of clothing over the naked body of a meaningless reality. Because these three writers employ clothing metaphors, we will speak a little regarding clothes and disrobement's implications for ornament. Finally, drawing on Summerson and Heidegger from this semester's reading, the essay hopes to offer for ornament an antidotal mode of being which is intersubjective, embodied and hedonistic, seen in the play of a dolls house as a ready-to-hand aedicule.

Concerning the Truth problem of ornament, if the answer to Pilate's question “What is truth?”(John 18:38 ESV) is “to say of what is that it is”(Aristotle (Metaphysics 1011b25)), we are left then to ask, what is? And to what 'is' should architecture be true? The problem we make for ourselves is illustrated in the castigation of Ruskin's 'supposed honesty' (Davies, p85) on the basis that Gothic's carved leaves are 'not real leaves'.(Davies, p85) This highlights something of the problem in the modern conception of that 'real' regarding which we are obliged to be honest. For the 'reality' which the modernist defends is here assaulted by no mere foliated dishonesty but an affront to the foundational truth upon which he bases his hope: 'truth to materials' is all when the material is the only ground for truth following the divinisation of a unified system of natural causes. I would contrast this with the real of an allusive universe, wherein reality is found to be a 'this' which is really about 'that'. In such an existence it would be entirely legitimate, and indeed true, to ornament in speaking of what is: that is, the parabolic God, who is there. I am speaking simplistically, but I hope I can draw us out first to the changed 'real' which has occluded our ornamenting, and second drawing us on whither our stone leaves.

I intend to write as academically as I can find the footnotes for, but equally personally, there is something in ornament's person-ality which forgives and requires an appeal to discover, in architecture, those elements which are, in Alexander's terms “alive in themselves...connected to us...personal” (Alexander, p308). Further, by way of apology, arguing through allegory especially in an area so potentially fraught, subjective and emotive as nudity and shame is a risk, but one which seemed a gauntlet run consistent to meet Loos' polemic with polemic by.

If a battle(Taylor, p108) for ornament was being fought at the turn of the twentieth century, the war, I believe, had already been lost. The landscape of available vocabulary and the evidence of any validating demonstration that might have been brought to ornament's defence had already been eroded.

Francis Schaeffer has fashioned some conceptual constructions to make sense of the shift which I will borrow and I will presume on his argumentation somewhat. It interests me less the case he makes for Modernism's origins in the Enlightenment's origins in the Renaissance, which is made by many, but rather the mechanism for its evolution. Schaeffer observes the birth of autonomous man through the expression of a reality read in the dichotomy Nature-and-Grace, where the Grace of heavenly things is the 'Upper Storey' and Nature is those bodily, earthly things in the 'Lower Storey'.(Schaeffer, p16 ) This is a familiar neo-Platonic dualism, but rendered helpfully in a language that is less static than a body/spirit duality. His storeys allow for a progression of concepts to pass into and out of the sacred over time.

The act of divorcing these two, Nature and Grace, is an act of authorship, of writing reality as if from outside, usurping the happy authorial relationship Grace had had with Nature which sustained their meaningful integration. Further, the autonomy to elect what exactly to put in these storeys is inherently unstable, with Cartesian doubt and logical positivism among the few tools in autonomy's epistemological toolbox (Tinker & Tinker, p202). Accordingly the Lower Storey degenerates, mechanistically, to an utter determinism. Taylor speaks of an 'intensification, almost exacerbation,' (Taylor, p3) of entrenching mechanisms of Modernism's critical competences and logic. Concurrently, the Upper Storey of ideals and meaning-making mutates to 'Freedom' following the death of God. Even then it struggles against a rising tide of united machinery which is absorbing everything once considered sacred. The unity desired downstairs is exclusive by definition and totalising in its ambition: the particulars of mechanics insatiably consume the fleeting Grace above them.

This does not happen all at once, there is a generational and geographical migration of this dualism and its effects, but, more importantly for this study, there is a migration across disciplines working its way outwards to the slower moving disciplines, in a manner alluded to by Evans, who proposes that “it is not unlikely that harmonic theory passed into architecture as an evacuee rather than as a coloniser.”(Evans, p265) Harmonic theory had pretended authority to define beauty in music by inalienable laws, ratios and mystique, and this indivisibly singular assurance was the composer's confidence. When harmony was exposed as both more complex and less mysterious, we observe the migration of whole-number legitimating mechanisms: we see failed ideals in a flight from a rationality which is ironing out the superstitious glitches of music's upper storey into architecture's, for a time.

Schaeffer identifies the 19th century realisation of the vanity of the project to unify knowledge in this manner:(Schaeffer, p46) this Lower Storey with all of its might of mechanised industry and scientism had not arrived at an ideal, but rather a unified and total pessimism. The chasm to the upper storey had only grown. It now manifested a 'Line of Despair'. The answer here, in both Christian and Secular Existentialism, is a 'Leap of Faith', whereby one resigns one's rationality in order to retain rationalism. A non-rational upper storey is manufactured, untouchably aloof from the demands of the machine below. We do so irrationally, and without thought to consequence because “man as man is dead.”(Schaeffer, p47) Into this non-rational Upper Storey we can store all the faith and fragile fineries that were under threat, for a time.

In using 'upper storey', 'leap of faith' and 'line of despair', I am deferring to this construction, which, for the tidy topology of its diagrammatic reduction of philosophical evolution, appeals for an application in the question of ornament, stowed, safely as it is, in the Upper Storey. Ornament flees hence because, within modernity, it will not fit our systems of knowing. It is dead weight in the machine for living in that we have constructed, and so we must move it to the upper storey to fill the vacuum up there.

The makeshift and unstable resolution to the dichotomy of nature and grace has far-reaching effects. Of chief interest to us is the notion that the instability of this dichotomy precipitates various defence and coping mechanisms which manifest themselves in the detail and debate of ornament. Firstly, in order to legitimise the dichotomy, art and/or ornament within the upper storey becomes sacred in and of itself, so to spiritualise the dispirited man. Secondly, in order to defend itself from the lower storey, art/ornament becomes spectacle, so by sensation to affect the desensitised man. And thirdly, in order to appease both warring factions, ornament is wilfully compromised through an explanatory language of clothing.

Ornament as Sacred: this is Art for Art's sake in the domain of ornament. It is a faith in pure ideal against that age of mechanical reproduction going on full steam downstairs. As Benjamin observes: “art reacted with the doctrine of l'art pour l'art, that is, with a theology of art...'pure' art, which ... denied any social function of art.”(Benjamin, p218) Ornament, in this way, becomes the object of our hope, a mysterious cultic trinket rendered in a sentimental style, which we hope, inexplicably, will save us, and will give, to our building, meaning.

Ornament as Spectacle: an imposed illusion on an epic scale, a decadent and dictatorial substitute for a former ornament. Rather as war, in Benjamin's terms, “supplies artistic gratification of sense perception,” (Benjamin, p235) so ornament is mere affect: a complicity in a Babel project, writ large and defended frankly. Spectacular ornament is the estimation of sensation above any slow, subtle speaking of love, which is surprisingly defended by Moussavi who notes that “ornamental mass movements in a stadium “bestow form to a given matter,' these buildings produce affects that seem to grow directly from matter itself. ... overcom[ing] the need to 'communicate' through a common language.”(Moussavi, p7) Ornament, for her,“is the figure that emerges from the material substrate, the expression of embedded forces”(Moussavi, p8) The use of a passive 'emerge' is indicative of a faith in impersonal, or apparently impersonal, forces, and the ambition to overcome 'communication' is reminiscent of exactly the destruction of language(Debord, Thesis 192) which Debord damns in his Society of Spectacle.

If the sacred and the spectacular are the modes of ornament after the upper storey leap, how is this reconciled to the lower storey? By what unifying picture can one explain the need of these things? Through what allegory can we make this known? I would argue that the metaphor of clothing employed by Ruskin, Semper and Loos, displays the depth and breadth of widespread acceptance of this radically dualised world emerging at their moment in history. Clothes serve as a picture of the freely chosen personal which adorns a given body; they are the demountable image of a thing. Clothing as a metaphor is not self-evidently legitimate and it carries with it assumptions of a dis-integrated world.

Ruskin's considerable opus presents us with a certain contradiction regarding ornament-as-integral or ornament-as-applied. This is illuminated in Chatterjee's reading of Ruskin, particularly with reference to his prescriptions regarding restoration. My hypothesis would venture that a younger Ruskin speaks critically of the ornament-as-detached-from-social-core, any alternative to which he is later at a loss to provide philosophical means to enable and so endorses a totally compromised restoration-as-veneer. In doing so, he exposes his deeper conviction as to the centre of architectural meaning, in what constitutes a long crisis of faith for him, a crisis which, I will argue, corresponds to Schaeffer's line of despair and the death of man.

For the notion of Ruskin as no mere revivalist in his concept of the value of Gothic I am indebted to Hardman who establishes two categories in Ruskin's architectural vision, that of 'Primary' and 'Secondary' architecture, where, "Secondary architecture … is imported and propagandistic … superimposed by imperial requirements … pseudo-transcendentalist rather than truly mythical or realist… it is a merely imaginary aesthesis … that exists in vacuo … its hypothesised population, undifferentiated or stereotyped..."(Hardman, p192) and, "Primary architecture … is rooted in landscape and vernacular traditions. It exists in perpetuity … it is reconciled to the accidents of its own material, not offering to ‘defy’ the fallen nature of the world and its inhabitants."(Hardman, p193) The Primary is the architecture Ruskin would like to believe in, one which romantically, and against his deeper assumptions, he seeks to promote.

Chatterjee expounds the contradiction in Ruskin, first by establishing the manner in which Ruskin conceives a building as a person, “endowed with spirit”(Swenarton via Chatterjee, p3) and “expressing personality”(Swenarton, via Chatterjee, p10), where ornament is its “bodily expression of thought”(Ruskin via Chatterjee p3), and crucially that can “die”(Ruskin via Chatterjee, p3) and it is “impossible ... to raise that dead.”(Ruskin via Chatterjee, p3) In this little handful of slightly strained and contextless quotations we can derive, firstly, Ruskin's abandonment of a resurrection faith, which is a resignation to Schaeffer's death of man, but much more importantly, we see the sentiment that buildings 'live' and, Chatterjee expands, that their life consists in those externalities of ornament and façade and so dies architecture in the decay and disruption of surface rather than by any structural failure: “The whole finish of the work was in the half inch that is gone.”(Ruskin via Chatterjee, p4) The prominence of façade in a Ruskinian view of architecture, or at the very least, among the Ruskinianisms that he, even unwittingly, inspired, is corroborated by the much attested power of his illustrations to inspire, which far outweighed the substance of his social argument in the minds of much of his readership.

However, it is in Ruskin's friendship and intellectual exchange with Carlyle's Transcendentalism, that we find, perhaps, the firmest grounds to speak both of Ruskin's shifting spiritual convictions and of the theoretical framework which explicitly informed his theory of ornament. Hardman summarises the Ruskin's shift thus:“urgently seeking a viable alternative to ... medieval Christian humanism, ... in Dante's response to Aristotle ... he knew this would be inadequate for the harsher world of Darwinism and aggressive imperialism”(Hardman, p191) Darwinism was, for Ruskin, an imperialism laying siege to, and scaling the walls of, his upper storey.

In their letters, Carlyle speaks of casting off his former faith as “Hebrew old clothes” and within this frame Ruskin speaks of his faith as “fluttering in weak rags,”(Ruskin, Works 36 p115) under the torment of those “Geologists' ... dreadful hammers”. Surveying their correspondence, Cate, sees at last a Ruskin emerging, “closer to the Carlylean mould and farther removed from the faith of his fathers"(Cate, p14) Furthermore, that in Ruskin, "the gulf between his rational and his emotional approaches to the world widened, rather than narrowed, in the course of his life.."(Cate, p58)

Carlyle's intriguing book Sartor Resartus, is suggested by Chatterjee to have been formative in Ruskin's adoption of a clothing frame of ornament. We see in this book a theory, an ontology, considered through clothes. Carlyle claims:“Clothes have made Men of us” (Carlyle, Sartor Resartus) where otherwise we would merely be, “To the eye of vulgar Logic ... a Soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition.”(Carlyle) and cements the dichotomy thus: “his Body and the Cloth are the site and materials whereon and whereby his beautified edifice, of a Person, is to be built.”(Carlyle) And so then, within this construction, “The first purpose of Clothes, as our Professor imagines, was not warmth or decency, but ornament.”(Carlyle)

Within this framework, Ruskin's understanding of ornament as the location of both the soul and the person of a building in the manner of clothing, is made clear. In attempting this mystical division Ruskin uses categories of labelling which fit snugly into Schaeffer's storeys, he goes so far as to label “higher” the elements of ornamentation over against the technical and construction “lower” elements which it masked.(Chatterjee, p5)

Semper, one among a number of 19th Century theoreticians seeking a legitimising origin to the practice of architecture, a seeking which I would posit is for them a search for a cosmological argument for the new God upstairs. Alluding to the source of ornament, Semper's identifies a 'Hearth' at the centre of ancient architectures, however, notably, he proceeds to marginalise this theoretical centre as he progresses into his analogy of ornament as dressing; going so far as to claim that cultural evolution necessarily entails such a separation of hearth from decoration. From the outset Semper presumes that decoration impersonally evolves through uncritical adoption of dead forms inherited without communicated meaning. This is the justification made for his particular anthropological method: “Hellenic culture could only have arisen on the humus of many past traditions long since dead and decayed and from alien motives brought over from without and no longer intelligible in their original meaning.”(Semper, p101) This theory of Hellenic evolution foreshadows the widespread default to spectacle following a disbelief in language's capacity to carry meaning. His method of navigating history is one that relies on the inspired autonomous individual, in this case Semper, to be our guide and interpreter of these mysteries, the high priest who makes plain and makes relevant the decoration in which his audience and client are to be bedecked.

Using this method, he argues that architecture begins with the hearth,“Throughout all phases of society the hearth formed that sacred focus around which the whole took order and shape. ... It is the first and most important, the moral element of architecture.”(Semper, p102) This hearth is not simply a form of fire at the geometric centre of a construction, but rather the sacred non-negotiable which defines a culture: “[architecture should] also make the form and character of its creations dependent on the ideas embodied in them...”(Semper, p102) it argues that craft follows concept, and that the way we world-build is derived from the unifying world-view that we have. But here ends any examination into that relationship, indeed, in speaking of Ruskin's hopes (Mallgrave, p188-9) for such authenticity, Semper protests:“How unfair it is to reproach our architects for lack of invention, when there is nowhere a new concept of universal historical importance being pursued with force and vigour. First provide some new ideas; then we architects shall find architectural expression for them. Until then, we have to be content with the old.”(Semper, p284)

What follows in Semper's writing on architecture is a substantial emphasis on 'dressing the body's nakedness'(Semper, p254), its analogies and applications. Explicitly praising the Greek thus: “Among these old traditional, formal elements of Hellenic art, none is so profoundly important as the principle of dressing and incrustation. It dominated all of pre-Hellenic art and by no means diminished or languished in the Greek style, but survived highly spiritualised, serving beauty and form alone, more in a structural-symbolic than in a structural-technical sense.”(Semper, p248) This spiritualisation of the ornamental process aims thus: “the material disappears behind the radiant polychrome dressing and becomes pure form.”(Mallgrave, p39)

The interaction a young Loos made with Semper in his 1898 article The Principle of Dressing(Loos via Risselada, p122), where by referencing Semper's argument for the derivation and legitimation of ornament from ancient wall-hangings, Loos reveals his roots and true affections. It becomes clear that where he fails in practice to embody the polemic of Ornament and Crime, it is where he has not fully realised the opposition of the faith he has in an evolution of culture towards the mechanically hygienically determined and the hope and memory he still holds that architecture should yet be delightedly evocative. From his practice it could be argued that the interiorising of ornament in work of Loos' practice reflects the privatisation of faith which is embarrassed at its irrational affection for ornament. The embarrassment stems from a flaw in Loos dichotomy: that is too absolute to attain. This is shown in the contrast he makes between two contemporary attitudes towards ornament.

Firstly: “The aristocrat...knows that the hours in which they work are their holy hours. The revolutionary would go to them and say 'It is all nonsense.' Just as he would pull down the little old woman from the wayside crucifix and tell her: 'There is no God.' The atheist among the aristocrats, on the other hand, raises his hat when he passes a church.” which is an excellent preaching against hypocrisy even if it assumes no 'holy time' and only power play. However, he does not escape religione as this critique leaves a religiose gap to fill.

Secondly, to fill the void left by the revolutionary, Loos establishes his own notion of the Upper story, assuming that this dualism is the mode by which primitive people engaged ornament, and that we in our current condition merely exchange in the content of the non-rational upper storey, Loos substitutes Art for art's sake as the opiate joy“I tolerate ornaments on my own body, when they constitute the joy of my fellow men. Then they are my joy too... for they all have no other way of attaining the high points of their existence. We have art, which has taken the place of ornament.”(Loos, p24)

I have attempted to parallel Ruskin, Semper and Loos' dichotomous language regarding ornament to illustrate how the comparison of architectural ornament with clothing assumes and exacerbates the divided self. I will now argue, within their clothing language, that this dualism is always power-play trading in shame, in a way much similar to Scheler's discussion of shame and the dualised man: “the essential characteristic of shame [is] conflict between man's spiritual powers and his servitude to his body. [Scheler] speaks of a bridge or passage between these two orders of being that is essential for man in order for him to be human. This is shame rooted in the nature of man.”(Lynd, p262 Note:22d)

To the extent that this dualism is pursued it observably leads to a nudistic mode of being and building, that is, by shame, to the morally, emotionally, or politically motivated abandonment of ornament and clothes. And this is no mere strip tease, but a moral crusade driven by the religiose zeal that lies at the heart of modernism: the division of the personhood of a person from the parts of their being is a reductive exercise of power, observable across imperial political powers responsible for the absurdity and depravity of much 20th Century social architecture.

“...modern man uses his clothes as a mask. So immensely strong is his individuality that it can no longer be expressed in articles of clothing. Freedom from ornament is a sign of spiritual strength.”(Loos, p24)

Emphatically what I am arguing for is not new clothes but a change of metaphor. However, I will indulge the sentiment as far as it helps explain the whither of our stone leaves. Clothing in this case is that expression of freedom and personhood which has been put into the upper storey for safekeeping from the rationalistic determinism of our body beneath.

In exploring the disornamenting disrobement parallel, it seems right to cite first, the early 20th Century German Free Body culture, particularly Pudor, an exact contemporary of Loos and author of Nacktkultur and then the slightly later Suren of Man and Sunshine. Clothes for Pudor are a weapon by which“the aristocracy of the "upper 10,000" held the nation down”(Pudor, p122 via Williams, p26 ) paralleling Loos' political advocacy for “...those trades that groan under the tyranny of the ornamentalist...”(Loos, p23) For both Loos and Pudor man is primarily a spirit, they share a gnostic vision of future hope and a platonic contempt for the material, sensual and embodied. Consistent with Corbusier, these advocates of Modernism, “sensuality and sensible experience are inferior to rationality” (Taylor, p108) and even, for Suren, that, “the body itself was a completely asexual object: yet another machine for living in.”(Worpole, p44-45)

Each of these nuditisms aggressively attempts to celebrate a crucially atrophied notion of what it means to be human. Each shaming, with a frequently racist contempt, the supposed unevolved primitivism of the dressed and embodied. This because the total person is fragmented and accordingly the parts war against one another, body against clothes, function against delight. This idealistic iconoclasm is an over-realised, future-focused construction latent still, I would venture, in the joyless minimalism of heaven-is-elsewhere warehouse churches.

Secondly, and a little later, but notably related, I would raise the nudity as Kundera presents it in his Unbearable Lightness of Being. Indulge me in an extended quotation:“Marching naked in formation with a group of naked women was for Tereza the quintessential image of horror. When she lived at home, her mother forbade her to lock the bathroom door. What she meant by her injunction was: your body is just like all other bodies; you have no right to shame; you have no reason to hide something that exists in millions of identical copies. ... Since childhood, Tereza had seen nudity as a sign of concentration camp uniformity, a sign of humiliation. There was yet another horror at the very beginning of the dream: all the women had to sing! Not only were their bodies identical, identically worthless, not only were their bodies mere resounding soulless mechanisms – the women rejoiced over it! Theirs was a joyful solidarity of the soulless. The women were pleased at having thrown off the ballast of the soul – that laughable conceit, that illusion of uniqueness – to become one like the next.”(Kundera, p54)

This imposed division of body from individuality is not the idealism of the former, Nacktkultur, rather, is the fallout from that. The consequences of that past idea, visited on the third and fourth generations. If the former was proactive, this is the reactive inheritance of learnt soullessness, which trades in shame as compensation. Visible, architecturally, I would argue, in second generation, disornamented, monolithic, social housing, in which the shame of the depersonalised is imposed, with a policed joyfulness, on their children: who no longer have any right to shame.

Thirdly, and briefly, in this little naked triptych, I will invoke Wink's non-violent reading of the Sermon on the Mount: “And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.”(Matthew 5:40 ESV) Wink, writing in Engaging the Powers, contextualises this action as one of naked resistance:“Only the poorest of the poor would have nothing but a garment to give as collateral for a loan”(Wink, p169) And in this action. “The creditor is revealed to be not a legitimate moneylender but a party to the reduction of an entire social class to landlessness, destitution and abasement.”(Wink, p179)

If Loos' is proactive idealism and Tereza's mother's is reactive brokeness, then this is a subversive use of disrobement, which still uses confrontational shaming (because in Judaism the shame was the beholder's rather than the naked's(Wink, p179)), which still employs a division of body and person, but in this case it is a critique of the dualism. It states that by taking away my ornament the empire is doing violence to the integrity of my whole person. The aim of such a protest, in Wink's excellent words, is to “depotentiate” the Powers that Be “by deft lampooning... burlesquing its pretensions to justice”(Wink, p179)

Architecturally and immediately we could look at OccupyLondon, rendered in an architecture of bare essentials and set against systemic injustice, they are actively engaging the present, and vulnerably. Vulnerability is the key, I believe, because Loos similarly hopes to critique, by sardonic lampooning, the aristocratic powers who have so debased building by the unjust employment of a subjugated workforce towards a Secondary architecture, but Loos critiques unvulnerably, he was not stripped naked, he bore no cross.

The clothing metaphor, with the epistemological arrogance that it entails in authoring a division of reality between 'function' and the 'frivolous', is advanced by a metaphor-maker who necessarily defines himself against a childlike submission to any world bigger than he, and with that definition loses his wonder and commits himself to an ever deepening entrenchment in the knower's supposed sufficiency under the banner of the project of progress. I would argue that this sentiment, the hope in the saving power of man's intellectual evolution, is there in the three writers we have considered:

“Pompeii [belonged] to the decline of art that had again become childish,” (Semper, p250)
“mere toys” (Ruskin, Seven Lamps p46)
“We have outgrown ornament” (Loos, p20)

Loos states the ambition most clearly, speaking frankly about cultural evolution, impeded by what he calls “stragglers”(Loos, p21). Even conceding that Loos is employing hyperbolic polemic, nevertheless, this is hugely problematic, the cost he proposes to stake for progress will be the child sacrifice of eugenics. If we make 'progress' absolute, if we make it a moral measure, we will appreciate neither the sacred value of the straggler nor the sustaining importance of child's play.

I will conclude this essay with a consideration of vulnerability, of play, of what it means to come to an ornamental kingdom like a child, and the crucial ways this redresses our dualism. I will argue that play is functional, and unselfconsciously so, in the best and broadest definition of humanness. Play is a pointing toward and a delighting in the reason man is. It says of what is that it is and, what is more, is shows why it is.

To this end, Summerson introduces the device of the aedicule, which is, at the same time, a metaphor and a methodology. Establishing from the outset that the aedicule is a creative work which finds its origins in “infantile phantasy”(Jung, p83, via Summerson, p1) or, in his illustration, by play, as with a dolls house: “There is a kind of play common to nearly every child; It is symbolism – of a fundamental kind, expressed in terms of play. This kind of play has much to do with the aesthetics of architecture.” (Summerson, p1) What is more, this mode of being, so obvious in children, of fascination and intensified sensation constitute a love which, he hopes, “none of us ever entirely grows out of”(Summerson, p2) Play, in this aedicular framework is a place-making, it is an act of creative choosing, naming, valuing and making personal. It stands as a 'small house' against the 'big house' of top-down institutions and impositions on the personhood of people.

What makes this particularly relevant is the contrast he draws between an aedicular mode of architecture and the playless mis-readings of Gothic which he highlights in a critique of Viollet-Le-Duc who missed the point of Gothic qua Gothic by giving primacy to technical premises, and so inevitably arriving at “the 19th-century fallacy that architecture is a matter of structure plus adornment.” By contrast, the aedicular methodology is an integration, it is a playful rescaling, a fractal reproducing, which delights by extension and allegory, it sees man caught up in a cosmic excitement, “in the infinity of the great, but also in the infinity of the small ...a world of bewildering activity and infinity”(Worringer via Summerson, p26) The claim of the aedicule is that we do not live in a depthless universe, flattened to a human, rational scale, prescribed by theoreticians, disembodied and aloof. Rather, we live in a world re-enchanted, enlivened, one angelological that longs that we be caught up in worlds within worlds. These are the hopes that are at play in play, they are, a little bit, magic.

In my introduction I asserted that ornament died a death at the hands of solipsistic, disembodied, religiose men who dualised the world at the eventual cost of the exclusion and illegitimation of ornament. And Play is our antidote? It will embody the disembodied, hedonise the religiose and integrate the solipsistic? There is the hope.

What then is Play? Play is the excellent both-and of engaging specificity:“a pleasure in the relationship between [child] and the setting”(Summerson, p2); and totality: “[play] should awaken...the great thought of the inner constant living unity of all things and phenomena in nature”(Jacobus, p17); through the fantastical“the heightened consciousness [arising from the] all-involving spell of make-believe”(Huizinga via Jacobus p8 ) or “constructed analogy”(Summerson, p1); and mundane: 'playing is doing...[playing] is a basic form of living.”(Winnicott, via Jacobus, p9)

Very essentially, play is a free act freely engaged, echoed throughout the literature:“a definition of pure play: the activity is free, undertaken voluntarily...” (Huizinga, via Jacobus, p8) “I would understand play as that activity which is freely and spontaneously entered into..” (Johnston, p34) Freedom is the prerequisite for childish abandon is the prerequisite for the ornament that Alexander praises in Kairouan tiling which display: “a spirit of childish abandon...created whenever a person is truly free, and doing only whatever is essential, whereas the artificial, excessively formal, careful, calculated quality in a thing always comes about when the person is not sufficiently abandoned, and not free.”(Alexander, p212) This is a freedom-for, by contrast, Loos' is a freedom-from,“we have fought our way through to freedom from ornament”(Loos, p20) which is, at best, a second best freedom, a mere breaking of a bounded set is a liberation unto agoraphobia, a sailing adrift on Crossan's lighthouseless sea.(Crossan, p44)

A freedom-for, by contrast, is centred on and submitted to a play-Thing that is material and ready-to-hand. In this way play is embodied, it rewards presence and it carries the tacit know-how of craft. A happy point illuminated by Heidegger and Polanyi both playing with hammers. Heidegger for whom the hammer is used without theorising to such an extent that in fact by theorising we would more likely make a mistake. And Polanyi points us to knowledge of and delight in materials, tools and processes accessible only through that bond with the thing, developed in a dual awareness and desire "When we use a hammer...I have a subsidiary awareness of the feeling in the palm of my hand which is merged into my focal awareness of my driving in the nail."(Polanyi, p55 via Jha, p57) So must play be, and cannot be so if we are theorising ornament at any distance from the craftsman's bench.

Barthes extends this, combining an argument for play's embodiment with a politically motivated notion of freedom, to speak of a specific virtue of wood in play's materiality contrasting with the “embourgeoisement” of Barbie and her plastic which “destroys all the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of touch..”(Barthes, via Warner, p15) instead rather, “...when the child handles [wood] and knocks it, it neither vibrates nor grates... it is a familiar and poetic substance, which does not sever the child from close contact with the tree”

It is by the desire inherent Polanyi's tool-guiding that I would carry us to the hedonism of ornament which I believe to be antidotal to the religiose mis-constructions of ornament. Ornament, has been filed in our upper storey, the constructed panic room, in which the non-rational arts are safe from the aggressive hegemony of determinism below. From this vantage art and ornament-as-art luxuriate in their redundance which is their privilege as sacred objet in the cult of Art for Art's sake. This, by all accounts, is a corruption of ornament, and in Freud's discussing toys and totems, it has been said that “there can be no doubt that art did not begin as art for art's sake.”(Freud, via Jacobus, p20 ) And in Rookmaaker's defence of the creative gift“it also does not follow that art is to be for art's sake. Just as a tree, being more than the totality of its functions, nevertheless has functions,” (Rookmaaker, p112) In elevating ornament to religione it is divorced from the very currency of hedonism on which basis it would function, and that basis is an intersubjective gift exchange of love by needs and desires met and affections reciprocated.

This exchange is a meeting of subjects and the end of solipsism, thereby establishing ornament as both a means and an end for relationship, relationship with the other and the ordinary. The ornamental relationship is perhaps more legible in the practice of play. In play, I believe, we meet Rookmaaker's tree in the manner Buber celebrates, to quote part of his beautiful encounter with a tree:“It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness....Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and type, law and number, indivisibly united in this event.”(Buber, p14) Playing is meeting thus and “the player is called into play by a potential co-player or play object, and while at play, treats other players and/or "playthings" as personal, creating with them a community that can be characterized by "I-Thou" rather than "I-It" relationships.”(Johnston, p34) “[Play] weaves the fabric of subjectivity, fastening the ties between self and other,”(Warner, p9) In this way play is a shameless relating with the real, here returning to Scheler's notion of shame that originates in dichotomising body and spirit: “the essential characteristic of shame [is] conflict between man's spiritual powers and his servitude to his body. [Scheler] speaks of a bridge or passage between these two orders of being that is essential for man in order for him to be human.”(Lynd, p262 Note:22d) What we can offer is less a bridge than a causeway of play.

To conclude and return to the beginning, we play for Truth. To interrogate Winnicott's transitional object theory of play, in which, through play, the child that we were and are transfers from subjective omnipotence into an objective reality: What is that objective reality and when do we cease transitioning? I would propose, always, to read our happy stone leaves as such, as eternal transitional objects serving a constant transitioning unto the biggest dimensions of a depthless objective reality of perpetual wonder.

I have attempted to parallel Ruskin, Semper and Loos' dichotomous language regarding ornament and its comparison to clothing as a way that leads to a divided self and so to shame. I have then hoped to contrast these with the parallels found in Summerson and others who allude to an (assumed by some to be unachievable) alternative of shameless undivided wholeness that finds itself in most basic play. There is a worldview uncomplicatedly presented in the Bible that declares that we are children in our Father's arms(Luke 15:20 ESV). I would argue that this in-our-Father's-arms-ness is the prerequisite for play and so the prerequisite for ornament. Am I allowed to say that in an academic essay? If it is a true truth, then it is the truth to which architecture must be true, it is the how and why of ornament. If true.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Aristotle – Metaphysics 1011b25

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Chatterjee, Anuradha – Birth, Death, and Rebirth: Reconstruction of Architecture in Ruskin’s Writings (Interstices Under Construction Symposium, Tasmania, 2011) http://unsw.academia.edu/AnuradhaChatterjee/Papers/1182394/Paper_Birth_Death_and_Rebirth_Reconstruction_of_Architecture_in_Ruskins_Writings

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Hardman, Malcolm – Intellectual lens and Moral Retina: A Reappraisal of Ruskin’s Architectural Vision, Ruskin & Architecture (Spire Books, 2003)

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\\Loos, Adolf – Principles of Cladding

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Rookmaaker, Hans – The Creative Gift (IVP, Leicester, 1981)

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Schaeffer, Francis – Escape from Reason (IVP, Downers Grove, 1968)

Semper, Gottfried – The Four Elements of Architecture (Trans Mallgrave,Harry Francis and Hermann, Wolfgang)(CUP, Cambridge, 2010)

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\\Heinrich Pudor – Nacktheit und Kultur (Stuttgart, c.1907)

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Worpole, Ken – Here Comes the Sun: Architecture and Public Space in Twentieth-Century European Culture (Reakton, 2000)

texting psalms 107-150

2012-01-24T08:40:00.009Z

Relentless Psalms. Still 07729056452, still unlimited.

Ps107-108 The city 107v4 sought for v7 dwelling and v36 fruitfulness. It is God who is sovereign over this city 108 v7-8 and God who will v10 lead us (&teach us to be in it, straining the text a little.) The city again, then, where, in dialogue with you especially, God has brought the city to meditate upon frequently this past year. God, presenting strands of hopes and love for London, and a seeking an ever-deepening theology of the city for both out embodied existence to this our home, and to all the ways that that is mirrored and metaphored throughout all our being. Thinking about the Bible's garden-to-city narrative in thinking about both psychoanalysis and childlikeness, and in all the ways that we are not commanded to return to the prelapsarian state but build with bricks, so our childlikeness is to be a grownup one..

Ps109 v1 Be not silent, O God of my praise. O 'Artists', we, who for pride praise not and preach not and pray not. Be not proud and be not silent. Pride which leads to silence which leads to death. Bang Bang. .. v4 But I give myself to prayer. Give. Myself. To Prayer.Footnote says: I am prayer. Pray thus, totally, as a way of total being. And totally giving: v24 the self-giving emptying of fasting. Pray desperately hungry prayer .. And of prayers against. We pray against an active reality of a personal evil which would be limitlessly destructive. We pray the discontinuation of systemic and generational sins, brokenesses, distortions, corruptions. A cease and desist to resisting God, a full stop to my entanglements in threads of evil, trains of thought, indulged fears and silences.. Might we be not silent today, oh God, for the good of St Marks and the sake of your name. Come Jesus.

Ps110 It is foreign both in its technicalities v4 and in its sense of God's militant holiness v1,5,6. But so He is, because sin deserves such. .. v3 God reclothes us in holy garments, the being-dressed-by and being-dressed-in-white are themes worth visiting, in-vesting one's imagination there. How it feels and what it means to have God clothe us. .. v3 The womb of the day, where the plans God has for us gestate, designed and intentioned. Oh may God make your day amazing, from its birth of dawn, unto a child's day. And now in pregnant sleep, trust we our enwombing God.

Ps111-112 With Crispin's 'why was Solomon given wealth?' (1Kg3-4) in mind, these wisdom psalms are also those one might turn to for a prosperity theology, but such a reading would be superficial ... Suggesting that (i) the wise man or woman 111v12 112v1 images God as the unfallen Adam & Eve, and (ii) the wise one identifies with their community 112v2 v5 v5, then a syllogistic (i) + (ii) = all those the wise one identifies with become identified with God. Wealth becomes no longer your own, but for all these others connected to you. Tenuous things, but let us be convicted today of our giving and money issues, the praise of these psalms and the wisdom they seek cannot be divorced from our giving away.

Ps113-114 v7 God desires to prosper the poor. We aim to find a true theology of money. In defining myself against prosperity theology I overcompensate and then some: the margin of error is a striving clause, a subtle defence of self-made-ness, which is a conviction oat least as damaging as prosperity theology. V9 Mothers and houses. We image this in mothering, we image this in providing homes for mothers. Recently learning of one who, albeit with the mixed motives of having a reliable, affordable housekeeper, intentionally sought a single mother as live-in house help/nanny. Walking with Gay Friends offers a similar commending of sharing home with those single etc, this is stretching the text a little. .. 114v1-2 In leaving the city, in detaching ourself from powers and securities, slavery and addictions, together we are able to form a sanctuary, a body in which God dwells. This is a recipe for ghettoisation, a Christ-against-the-city theology of rejecting culture. The picture I have (in an imagination affected by images of the cruise disaster) a picture of being on such a sea (v3?), with such a mass of people, and of having a tank of fresh water (v8?) - we serve those shipwrecked not by pouring the fresh water into the sea for them, but by establishing a distinct and conspicuous place on the raft dedicated to giving them fresh water to drink. Maritime and strained analogical apologies.

Ps115-116 v1 Not to me but to Jesus be the Glory. This is right worship, and it is such a joy. v2-3 Takes on a new meaning for the Christian for our God is not just in the heavens but has broken into our totality in Bethlehem, walked and talked. & v8 we become like the object of our worship. This makes sense, over the long run the mind evolves to fit that to which its attention continually dwells upon. If I worship the idols of money sex power or whatever, I will die, these things are not living but dead, I will become unalive, like they, running on v4-7 without sight or speech or feeling. But Jesus, who sees (116v15) and hears (116v1) and whose heart beats fully alive (115v1) – Jesus is the true object of the universe's worship. Jesus, no idol, is the image of the invisible God and the same principle allies – the more we worship Jesus, and dwell with him in heart and mind, we will become more like him, embedding ourselves in his magic miraculous. So in our own 116v8 eyes, v9 limbs, & v10 speech, redemption comes. Sometimes it is v6 that simple.

Ps117-118 117 Brevity, sufficient brevity. Teach me this. Within its two verses we sing who we are, who God is and why we are: loved by a faithful God for the sake of the nations. Ps118 There is an amazing density of potential platitudes here! Please please believe: v2 God is all love all the time, God is all love all the time. v6 God is for us, be fearless, God is for us, be fearless. v7 God is on your side, God is on your side. v8 God is a better refuge, God is a better refuge. v14 God is stronger, sing is broken, God is stronger, sin is broken. v17 It is not death to die, it is not death to die. v23 God is beautiful and in my sight, God is beautiful and in my sight.v24 Hari ini, this is the day, this is the day, with all of its new mercies. v26 Blessed is hard to mistranslate, blessed is hard to mistranslate. v29 God is all love all the time, God is all love all the time.

Ps119 Praying this infectious psalm for a new season of reading scripture. This is not about the-law-and-not-the-heart. Reading the longest psalm for our hearts: when our hearts were far off they were v70 fat and insolent, like Iris Murdoch's 'fat lazy ego' that we are when left to ourselves, and only a God will save us. This text a picture of our salvation and how we play our part, so commands for the heart v2 v10 v58 v145 seek, entreat, cry out to God with your whole heart. Your. Whole. Heart. Not a compartmentalised or token affair. To be transformed into those who play in the mega-miraculous nothing but total surrender will do. Spiritual disciplines for the heart v11 store up God's word there with memory and meditation, v34 v69 teach your heart obedience. And so our hearts are transformed into v7 uprightness, v111 joy, and v161 awe. These attributes saturating this piece, let us be so transformed, pray that God would v32 enlarge our hearts and v36 incline our hearts towards him. In all this these are the few verses that stand out this morning, being enlarged and being inclined obvious verbs of transformation and change. What does it mean for one's heart to be inclined towards God? Aware constantly of more than what is in front of me, listening to the voice that would speak my name in all things. May my heart be metallic as to a divine magnet, or a loaded die towards my first love. So my attention dwells here & not on v37's worthless things. Remake me, God, do it as a graced gift, but teach me to participate, v112 in the active: I am to incline my heart. So inclined, because v136 God first inclined himself to us.

Ps120-121 On mission. 120 is by one far flung. To be far flung is to forego the home-grown comforts of straightforward communication and likemindedness. Go. Go to a land where people disagree with you. Go. Do hard things in hard places. Go speak peace to a war zone. Go to such a place as you will need Ps120's petition daily. .. Ps121 Where does my help come from? Is God my helper, my crampons, my nightwatch, my shelter, my shade, my lifesaver, my keeper, my guard? There are other security providers. Indeed, the market for lifesavers is a competitive one, and a lucrative one. Not a few tube ads want to sell you a face-saving shelter and shade, not a few insurance companies will work through the night to keep your life (and your pound of flesh). So go. Go make disciples. Go where insurers won't cover you. Go where your satnav can't guide you. Go where there's no plan B. Only God. Visibly only God.

Ps122 A prayer for you&I, God please v3 bind us together to image your holy city, it can only be you that keeps us and sustains us. Keep v2 our feet within your gates, your courts, keep us within your will and as we dwell here with you, teach us more of yourself, give us ears, and keep us within these gates with thanksgiving and praise as Ps100v4. Keep us122v5 accountable, v6 peaceful, and v7 secure. Keep us bound together for v8 the sake of our brothers and sisters, and v9 for Jesus' sake.

Ps123 On being inclined, lifting up one's eyes and so turning one's heart a certain way. This is to spend one's life within the gates of heaven, seeking God. Here. Here here here. In each moment lift up your eyes to God, like looking for the one you love in a crowd. & to see God in this everyday way is to experience his authority, as in the metaphors of these verses. Authority, we noted, is second-personal, it is a spoken responding requesting prompting. Renew our minds God, attune us to your authority, even now. & v3 have mercy on us have mercy on us. New mercies, beloved, lucky are we. Hallelujah.

Ps124-125 I spoke a little to contrast freedom-from with freedom-for in Ornament, but this is freedom-by. The difficulty with freedom-by is that it is a freedom unto an indebtedness to one's liberator. Good, only if the one that frees you is Good. Otherwise we leave one snare for another snare, one slavery for another slavery, addiction to addiction, death to death. But. The snare is broken. How to speak this unplatitudinally? .. 125 (v1) 'You are steady.' What a word. Those who speak such over us barely know their kindness. Our steadiness should not be our own. .. These two Psalms contrast with two self myths: the Houdinic myth of self-liberation: escapistism. The unfounded myth of self-support: gyroscopism. When all around is sinking sand, we are testimonies both to him that pulled us out and to his solid ground in which we now have our foundations.

Ps126-127 127 Speaks to real ardent questions made of God, to longings that are deep – for v1 home, for v1 our city, v2 out work, v3 our children... when and how and what and please and oh. But. Being drawn back: unless it is God it will all come to nothing, these will be empty pretences, surely to crumble. Even if you build the house, watch the city, get the job and parent the children, you will do it in vain, unless it is God. So, let's try to leave behind our pride again, surrendering to the God that is God, leaving behind striving, accepting belovedness, and v3 God gives his beloved sleep, God gives his beloved sleep. Jesus, please be the one through whom by whom and for whom we love this city, we build a home, we pursue excellent work and care for children. You are our God, and we trust you for 126's promises in all these, that you meet us in our waiting, that you turn tears to joy, ashes to beauty, anxiety to overflowing life. Restore us, for real, that you overflow into our home, city, work, children.

Ps128 Be fruit full. In your praxis and allegory, flavour and ambition, diet and delight. I want to speak this Psalm as a benediction over many of out friends and to do so without a flinch of prosperity-caution. It is hard not to read vending-machine theology into v1's 'everyone..' and following. However, a corrective might be found in a meditation on 'Blessed..' via Mt5 and via these: the blessedness of family, the blessedness of children, the role of the table.. An apologetic for the blessedness of being fruitful is needed in the now: where families are abandoned, children are aborted and the table is substituted with television. The blessedness of such blessings is not self-evident for many.

Ps129 I don't pray against an active personal evil very often. This because of two major issues. (1) I have a thin theology of spiritual warfare, which is a less than fully personal understanding of the universe. And (2) because of my own complicity in injustice. Oh pray the swift frustration of unjust ways in my own life.

Ps130-131 Lest we forget, God would have us wait on him, 130v5-6 we wait expectantly and in hope, becoming fit for heaven, as out attentiveness sharpens in accordance with v2 God's attentiveness to us. (And so we find ourselves again where even angels fear to tread.) 131 The pleasure of God's presence, the quieting of out hearts and minds, our safety. God is real, draw near with Faith. Thank you.

Ps132 Blessed remembrance. We the blessed store promises in our scripture memory :: the God of scripture enacts remembrance drawing blessing from his store. We exist in a covenant reality in which memory and promises are crucial. We promise to remember and God remembers his promise. Struggling a little to construct an elegant reciprocal description of our cooperation with God through promises and memory.. Blessed promises: Blessed are those who endure hardship v1, [on God's account] for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst and stay-up-late for righteousness/worship v7, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed is the one who heart is set to go v7 on pilgrimage, they shall go Ps84v5-7 from strength to strength. Remember remember remember.

Ps133 v1 'Behold' – be beheld in your dwelling, grant an audience, welcome a stranger, live an examined life, open to a warts-and-all scrutiny, in season and out. v1 'Good and Pleasant' – dichotomising, there are living arrangements that are 'good' but not pleasant, or 'pleasant' but not good. Our unity is a moral good and a phenomenal delight. I am reading onto the text a little but good-dwelling we ought to do and pleasant-dwelling we get to do! Ours is the both-and life. .. v1 'Brothers [and sisters]' from ESVSB's note I appreciate something new. This Psalm acknowledges the rare pleasure, not only of non-conflictual sibling cohabitation, but also the rare occasion that the ground condition is sufficiently fruitful to sustain extended generations in one place. Unity's preconditions are obviously emotional-spiritual and yet also immediate-practical. How good and pleasant it would be that Lambeth might provide custom sufficient to employ the twelve Jackson offspring-to-be in our bakery in their truly best giftings. How good and pleasant that our home group might enjoy unity by the economic provision (+visas) to stay to nurture a locality long-term. .. v2 'Precious oil' – this enduring dwelling, even imaged in small ways, is a precious act of consecration. By our unity we are setting this Place apart, enacting spiritual dominion symbolically. .. v3 'Dew of Hermon' – this enduring dwelling is a practical agricultural sustaining: by our unity we are like water to the vegetable patch. Finally and beblessedly v2 'Beard..' - just saying..

Ps134-135 134 is a blessing on all mercy justice and so the worship that is the Robes project, please God. 135v15-18 on the deadness, stasis, inertness of idols, again, this has been a theme in today's work and this evening's lecture, that idolatry is a compulsion towards dead gods, towards unmysterious, tamed, self-constructed attempts to live in the past. Be alive, be present, to the God who is alive, and Other and who will break in and surprise you, who demonstrates that the past need not repeat itself. The God to be in awe of, the God who answers back. We come to talk, God, we come to kneel.

Ps136 Breathe in, breathe out // His love endures forever // Live a responsive antiphonal life // His love endures forever // Be patterned and rhythmed by. His. Love. Forever. // His love endures forever. // Endure by/with/in/because // His love endures forever. .. Our premise-testimony-conclusion: His love endures forever. Thus we live between the lines of steadfast love. The God who acted in history, who is active, who will enact his promises. On this premise we sing.. To demand total worship, awe and wonder from us, it would be enough for God to be God v1-3, it would be enough for God to be creator v4-9, it would be enough for God to have given us land v21 and food v25. These would be sufficient grounds for extravagant worship. How much more then to the God who gave himself up to death for us? How much more?

Ps137 Where there is Babylon, harps are hung. Where harps are hung, there is Babylon. So recognise our captivity to forces of recorded music, amplified, synthesised and professionalised music. And bring me my bow, oh clouds unfold. Bring me Explosions in the Sky. Post-rock, at its best, is a call to unforget v5 skilfully made music in new songs of impassioned lament. And so, let us make music a thing to be made more than a commodity to be bought, more than an act under duress, more than therapy or nostalgia. .. We sing of the reality of Jerusalem, but more than that, we sing as the reality of Jerusalem: a singing city. The reason for our singing, the substance and effect, is Jerusalem, where God dwells, in our singing. So dwell, melodically today.

Ps138 God of all glory and lowliness, who, to trade in spatial metaphors, swoops down to lift us up, this prayer evokes remembrance of God's movement towards us, all we do is response. This is a prayer over incomplete things, a prayer for the despondent, a prayer for the apathetic. This is a prayer for anyone desponding such, v7-8 God will complete the work begun in you.

Ps139 There is a reason this Psalm is our staple, it is like the tardis, this Psalm, bigger on the inside. With one baby today who is perfectly formed, fearfully and wonderfully made, eliciting praise of this God at the mystery of existence. Search me and know me. This is the dangerously expansive prayer that opens the tardis door beyond a text.. examine me, test me, and guide me in the way everlasting. Submitting to this terrifying prayer I am also convicted that our missional service should look like this: enabling others to pray this prayer. To do this would keep us from both self-righteous hubris and cheap grace, for this is the place of greatest love & greatest truth. God, lead us to this place, search us and transform us, in the way everlasting. And please God equip us to lead people into that space, that they would experience their birthright belovedness and allow their integrity to be scrutinised by your light.

Ps140-141 140v1 Evil without and 141v4 evil within.. So here, Thresholds and the Spatiality of Transgression: 141v3 door of my lips and v7 mouth of Sheol. Thus evil is like water: you can swallow it, it can swallow you. But also, such thresholds are two-way streets, it is not what goes into a mouth but what comes out.. Mt15v11. What comes out? We are vessels, 2Cor4v7, made to be filled with living water, made to pour out living water. Oh set a guard God. .. Brokeness and Proclamation: 141v5 strike me, with correction, with hard words. v7 break me, my pride, my comfort, my idols. v7 scatter me, send me, place me, pot me. v6 use me, seed me, use my words, use my broken state, use my distribution. All for the cause of making God known amongst those who know not. Brokeness is necessary. If we learn nothing else from gardening. .. 140v6 God is God. God is my God. God is God. God is my God. God is God..

Ps142-143 143v8 'Let me hear in the morning of God's steadfast love, in God I trust. God make me go the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul.' We lift up our souls, in the ESV's dependence & allegiance, in and for delight and alignment. We love to wake up to you God, please come into our laments today, let us hear you speak of your steadfast love, 142v1-2 on honesty with God - here we see God's kingdom work as therapeutic in a non-pejorative sense, the God who 142v6 hears us, v7 in our safe place, and engages us in a dialogue to 143v10 teach us and 142v3 so transform us, so that our lives might be patterned differently (Acts 3). Let us go and do likewise.

Ps144 We live in an enwarred reality. We need training for both hands and fingers. Because our hand's memory is forgetful 137v5. Yet, having trained us for battle, the fight is his, the v2 subduing is his, the victory is his because the v2 fortress was his, and the v6 weapons were his and the demonstrations of power v5-6 which scattered the enemy were all his. The war is won Rm8v37 etc, but/and God helps us in our skirmishes which are fights against lingering lies v8 v11. The big lies which undermines the peace of the nation and the little pervasive lies which we have believed of ourselves. This is a fight, a fight God promises to train us for and to fight for us and with us. .. v12-14 An architectural agricultural benediction May it be so, that we would be ones and bear ones who bear fruit and bear weight.

Ps 145 God's work is to be v4 our commendation, v5 our meditation, v6 our declaration, v7 our pouring forth into song. Were we given words for any greater purpose? This an evangelist's Psalm. I waste words by comparison, I speak an untruth by allowing people to assume a full truth in what limited and cautious words I use for God. Of vocabulary, I am throwing the cricket ball of a gospel articulation at this and the next generation but now pitching it steep enough nor throwing hard enough. I have not taken a long enough run up, I have not allowed God to train my hands. Here, now, in this texting, drinking this coffee, reading this Psalm, this is my run up: a meditation on God, the glory of his kingdom v11, the safety of his upholding v14, the sufficiency of his provision v15, His satisfaction, His kindness v17, His nearness v18, His saving v19, His preserving v20. What a Psalm! Prayers for Oxford, for mission, for us, for our words

Ps146-147 Praise God, wonder and amazement, do you not know, have you not heard who He is? My God is 146v3 immortal, v5 hope-giving, life-breathing, a very present help to me, v6 the creator designer sustainer, a faithful unfailing lover, v7 the source and inspiration of and for all justice, He's so good. God feeds us, God provides, God nourishes. God liberates, God desires to liberate you from your past, your hurt, your addiction to being less than you could be. Do you not know? v8 God envisions, God expands your horizons and brings into focus and dazzles with new light and colour, God brings a whole new perspective. Why keep your eyes on the ground when there's a whole world out there? God loves you God loves you. v8 God sees you, God holds you in mind and aches with your aches and v10 this aching-for0you God is sovereign don't you know, how good is that?! You should worship the one God, you know, it's 147v1 such a good thing. v2 God builds and gathers, are you interested in those things? v3 God heals the broken-hearted, I know that's the hardest one to hear, but the best one too, right? Your heart dear hearts. This God who is close to you knows the stars, v4 all of them, the cosmos is His. Ridiculous ridiculous. v5 power and understanding - are you interested in those? v13 strength and v14 peace, that sounds quite good. And v16-17 the snow all over the place at the weekend - eliciting playfulness and pleasure. God. God God God.

...

200words: the artist

2012-01-22T12:58:00.001Z

“...rejoice in the wife of your youth” Proverbs 5:18

A gestural film of eyebrows, this is physical comedy of a very high order. A wondrous gift, silently given. Unselfconsciously immune to accusations of pastiche because of the obvious pleasure taken in its making. This is a ravishing revisiting of the past, without irony, and such excellently executed tellings of history should be commended, were that the past was only dogs' tricks and tapdance. Hollywood's foundations, however, deserve to be visited with a more critical eye than this reaffirmation of institutionalised vacuity with its celebration of extramarital superficiality.

To understand this film, consider that Valentin embodies Hollywood: perpetually self-related and inevitably in crisis. One could scarcely ask for a more vivid parable of the life lived incurvatus in se: when you believe your own hype you will use people to make films rather than using films to love people. Our screen is so overpopulated with anti-heroes that we barely register that this film is resolved only when our protagonist trades in his outmoded wife of silent cinema for a new accessory to his pathological obsession with fame. Films about films defend technique in an unstable age of technique; acting about acting here defends the myth of the genius.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1655442/

texting psalms 90-106

2012-01-20T16:00:00.003Z

Being enpsalmed, a joy. As ever, we play with words on 07729056452.

Ps90 v12 Numbered days, and how to have the Time of your life. We count because time is not circular, Judeo-Christian time is linear – on its way somewhere. Numbering is a naming which is event-making, which is to time as place-making is to space in the image of man, rendering days as personal, intentional, sacred, sabbatical. Numbering, yeh, this is the life-verse of planners everywhere, but given that no one knows the day or time Mt 24v36, no numbering system would render a Trafalgar Square Timex countdown to any Aztec apocalypse viable. But we are counting down, counting down our advent calendars in eager expectation. And counting up. So we write our histories as they correspond to our prayers over numbered days, singing psalms that remind us of the good times, singing psalms that remind us of the best times. We number our days past to remember our previous v12 How-Long prayers faithfully answered, that they may be read by our children v16.

Ps91-92 How do you imagine a refuge? A cave? A tower? A tree? What is it like to be in a fortress? A tent v10? Playing like children, making dens with sheets to be safe...God, you are my refuge, show us more of what it feels like to be refuged by you, demonstrate to us your fortressing 92 v2 Good morning beloveds, declaring God's love for us, steadfastly over all this day (amazing). V12-15 was my prayer for two getting married, so I keep praying it for them and their marriage as they travel, and in that ask God that others would come and speak words into us. Grateful for this vision of the good life, of flourishing (like a tree) rooted in dwelling in God's dwelling, to bearing fruit in old age. I pray that we bear fruit in old age., that we end well, and that we are part of others' flourishing in old age, we pray in for now and today.

Ps93-94 Robes yeah. Clothing as a good metaphor here? The clothes here are not analogous to what God merely does, divorced from who he is. God would cease to be God if he ceased to be strong v1 and majestic v1. There is no God behind this God, he is the v2 everlasting One, v5 trustworthy One, uninvented One, preexistent preeminent One, 94v7,11 the all-knowing fore-knowing One. And Col1v15-18 has to remind us of this, less because we are apt to deny God as uncreated creator but that we are apt to dilute, diminish, and dualise in ways that try, in small ways, to assume for ourselves bits of God's autonomous authoring which is not ours. God is before us in his knowing 94v8. God is before us in his being 93v2. This is the absolute dichotomy, the chasm, the true upper storey, so to speak. There is a One God and there is creation. There is no bridge. No bridge but Jesus. No Jesus but a crucified Jesus, no necessity/sufficiency to a crucified Jesus except that he be the universe's point of origin. No point of origin except that it be singular, exclusive, Holy. .. I am arguing beond the text. .. God of 94. He v9 hears, v17 helps, v19 consoles. So let us trust and so let us be: v22 refugees and refugers: heard, helped, consoled, hearing, helping, consoling. In robes freely given, freely give. For joy.

Ps95-96 Happy wholes, these psalms, resisting too much deconstruction, asking rather for an abandonment, let's get swept up and praise God, shall we? Worhsip prasie worship, play play play. These are psalms that speak of the magic in the universe, found without overthinking in child's play, the magic in the universe we know is Col1 Jesus. So roar and shout and sing, yeah. And these put me in mind of all that's passive and unearned in our meeting this God, let's just receive him, shall we? Bow down 95v6 96v9, because its all there is to do sometimes. Worship. 96V1 sing sing a new song, yes, but don't overthink it .. sing it, sing it as the direct uncomplicated response that it is and can be. V6 glory and majesty, power and beauty.

Ps97-98 Why can ___ not see this God? How can I make this God harder to deny in my life? How am I obscuring the view of the lightening light of this God by my life? v1 The Lord reigns let ___ rejoice, let ___ be glad, v4 let ___ see, even tremble, v6 let ___ see your glory. 98 How is God made known? In salvation. And only sufficiently in salvation. Who has God saved? Me. Who needs to know? ..

Ps99-100 99v9 The Lord our God is holy. Forgetful of God's holiness, I would remember and v1 tremble. Take this seriously. Teach me to tremble. 100 Full of statement of objective truth about who God is, and the subjective response of authentic worship. I will commit to memorise this hundredth Psalm, its four verses of three lines. Thank God for such a psalm as this, full of truth, where declaring who God is v3 v5, we can know who we are and rest there: v3 God made us, we are his.

Ps101-102 v5 Whoever has a hauty look I will not endure. How to not endure an other without yourself being hauty in your look and arrogant in your heart!? We are called to a radical purity matched by a radical radical love. If and as I wobble in this, it is a defaulting to a comfort zone of acute religious hypocrisy or blandly loving liberality. Love without purity is harmful, purity without love is harmful. Jesus is our measure and supply for both love and purity. 102 Disconsolate owls, withered hearts of grass, forgetting to eat, and so unsupped and desapped, are devoured by an active ravaging depression, a Melancholia that is so nearly a true perception of a cruel world. Oh bulemia, suffering and the where-is-God-? question.v2 Speedily. v18 for the sake of your name on the tongues of our children. v25 It is important to let God be God, at one level, for the sake of our mental health, for the sake of our living in the true reality of things. v25-27 a right clothing metaphor establishes the right dichotomy, not between sacred-and-secular in an arbitrary sartorial partition, but rather, because earth-and-heaven are both in the created category, there is a One tailor and we are his poiema: hand-crafted, tailor-made, bespoken by the God who speaks us into being, moment by moment. Please God, speedily, do no leave us to ourselves, do not leave us to ourselves.

Ps103 8-15 Grace. Expensive grace. I had the sensation in church yesterday that sometimes I'd rather God wasn't gracious with me, a resigned fatalism is so much easier, graciousness is overwhelming ego-destroying .. grace acknowledged cannot go unresponded to, so we have to pick ourselves up again, surrender again. God's grace will not leave us to the comfort of ourselves, I need to hear this again. v12 Like talk of the God who 'forgets' our sins and places them at a distance, as if they could still be there lurking on the periphery of vision, (ambiguous indexicals) rather, there is no distance between east and west, their mutual exclusivity tells us that our sins are no more. Thank you, God and lend us an ability to articulate this. v14-18 remembering dust to dust, and our own dustiness, our own embodied, mortal and finite being. Remembering this in remembering that we are not responsible for everything, only God is, and he knows us and loves us where we are.

Ps104 Bless. The. Lord. O. My. Soul. 104 Creating creation. What would it mean to practice creationism? The literality of creationism should be judged less on its truth as history, which will be unknowable for now, but rather on its beauty when demonstrated in the moment. So aim with for all things bright and beautiful at all times and in all places. So, doing creationism – 14-15 making wine, as Jn2, this is dominion done well, a traceable God-honouring diet of conspicuously 'created' ingredients. 27-28 caring for animals, sustaining them and dominion done well. And the over-arching creationism of living a life rhythmed in six days, building to a climax of dominion's demonstrable delight. Let us seek to be literal six day creationers, let us make it our song and our work.

Ps105-106 Seek. His. Presence. Continually. Actively, earnestly, desperately be looking. Him, the One that Is. Presence, immanence, Emmanuel, amongst us, within us. Non-stop, without ceasing, in every breath you take. 106 Singing songs about our unfaithfulness. v13, v19, v24, v28, v32 This is not the emphasis of our v1 #Give thanks to the Lord our God and King, his love endures forever.. Lamenting our lack of lament hymns, again. I need to learn to lament well, and to remember the reality of God meeting me in my unfaithfulness again and again. I fall off the horse and I tend to wallow, and this is the sin of counting-yourself-out, of exacerbating the sin of stumbling with the sin of claiming the know better than God's forgiveness. 104 God sustains creation. 105 God sustains us. 106 Inspite of our unfaithfulness. Bless the Lord, O My Soul.

texting psalms 73-89

2012-01-20T15:39:00.005Z

If you felt the gap while I was away writing things architectural, there are unceasing Psalms via unlimited texts on 07729056452. I flatter myself.

Ps73-74 Job revisited. Over problematising the problem of evil is a demanding all knowledge without acknowledging the challenges present by what we *do know*. Trying to make sense of suffering is intellectually exhausting v17 and an exercise in distraction from worship. Rather, let us take as much as we *do know*, as much has been revealed of God v28 and his goodness v1, and take this as an intellectual sanctuary v17 and out of that safety live a life less bitter v21, less envious v3 and increasingly certain. Doxological epistemology as an antidote to that temptation to introversion in the face of the problem of suffering. Or on why we should not suffer in silence. .. Ps 74 Memory. God doesn't have a memory surely? Like, how can a train get lost? God's memory is our best analogy for the not-known and not-mended of the not-yet in which we now live? In such petitions we appeal to God's selective memory, that he would make the past present (as memory does). God please remember: the congregation v2 you chose and loved in the past; the covenant v20 you promised and kept for them in the past. We ask of God's memory, selective forgetting for our sins Hb8v12. If God is Reality, if he forgets something, it ceases to exist. Accordingly, he can't forget it unless it ceases to exist (syllogistic salvation?). So death. So the Cross is God's only and sufficient forgettery. Let's not settle for an anemic amnemonic God, but a warm blooded incarnate One who bled for the forgetting of our sins. .. Also interesting here is the translation of v3's perpetual ruins. Ruins, memory, perpetuity, lamentation and Coventry cathedral deserve an Is58v12 text of their own. .. Blameless ones, God sees a sinless you. So, forgetting what lies behind..

Ps75-76 The name of God and the glory of God. 75V1 God's name is near us 76v1 God's name is great in israel, in the community of those in love with Him. This is why we should pray the Jesus prayer, allowing God's name to be our thoughts' pattern and cry. Jesus name should be woven into the very fabric of our being, closer that breathing. & contained within this prayer-as-breathing a fear and trembling, a breathless awe before the God to be feared, worship for God the almighty holy other, God the righteous judge, God to whom I am subject, God who sees me as I am, reverential worship wells us in both these psalms as today we repeat and treasure the name of God. Breathlessly breathing Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.

Ps77-78 Pray out loud. It makes a difference for me in my praying. Aloud. We are bodies embodied, let us engage everything that is of God in the movement of air, wind, breath and in singing, sounding, speaking an aloud prayer that is entimed, that enters a room, that echoes, that carries one out of oneself, out of half-finished half-felt sentences of interior monologues. In a similar way, to some extent, texting has forced me to pray in whole sentences and so to curtail my self-deception. Pray aloud for a time will come when you may cease to be able to v4 as Rm8v26. .. Speak aloud to God, speak aloud to the flock 78v2. Speak aloud and teach our children to speak aloud v6. Speak aloud because God has spoken in giving a testimony and written law v5 .. Preach the gospel, use words if you have to. You have to, fairly quickly fairly often. (Analogous to talking about sex: not using words with a frequency and weight commensurable with the power and value of sex is a symptom of dysfunction and a recipe for misconstrued misinformation). Preach the gospel, because if our generation assumes it, our children's will forget it and their children will deny it. Preach the gospel, use words, cite history, at length v72, for ours is an apologetic for the long faithfulness of God from the long faithfulness of God. Oh hope in God. Cycles of church pain can be broken. Hope in God, Is49v15. Unforgotten unforgetters.

Ps79-80 The Lord is still still still my shepherd, 79v13 80v1 Thank you God, for your shepherding us as night falls, thank you for being our shepherd this evening. Teach us to be sheeply, but not sheepish. And teach us to image you in being rightly shepherdly to the flcok you have given us. 79V1-3 v10, bodies and blood, as we think about embodiment ... God thank you for making out bodies the site of our meeting you, where we may experience sickness, shame and persecution, you bring your infinite glory into our finitude. You are the God who meets us boundlessly, though we are bounded. What a glorious mystery. 80V8 Roots. Rootedness and flourishing and being kept alive v18 ... I don't need to hear anything more on the virtues of rootedness now ... Lord, rather, please lead us in embodying it in the grapevine belovedness that is our true identity. We long to know you, merciful and good God.

Ps81-82 v1 Aloud again, because in these two days I have forgotten again. ESVSB: The privilege of hard words. True. Oh for a hard word heard well. And rejoiced in. Hard words, soft people, there's today's Driscollism, hard but not harsh Pr15v1. God correct me by hard breaking of my resistance to gentle ways.. v10 Open wide. Ours is a bacon and eggs reality. Let us never not tell that, emphatically, ours is a feasting God. Perhaps a meditation on this mouth fast-ened open, how wide and long a wait between fillings? Fortnightly v3? Combining the parade of 81, the gods and injustice of 82, and probably some of my Carlyle hangover, I am put in mind of the They Don't Care About Us video. In so far as we are gods, let us dance a deliverance of the needy from the wicked.

Ps83 Shame v16-17. Let me think about shame some more, not because it's impressive or intelligent or any other idol, but this seems to be a real calling for this time. Because it matters, and because of Jesus. These two verses tell us of the way that shame can put us in touch with reality, it can have us acknowledging that there is a God. Shame can reveal ourselves to ourselves and so v16 have us seeking the saviour we need. So use us move us, and them, Jesus. Maybe v16 is a right and healthy shame, which can bring us to life, while v17 is a pathological shame that leads to death (doesn't quite work) – but shame is a choice, of the Dt30v15 kind. How will we respond in our shame? How will we enable others to respond in their shame? Choose life. Jesus make this concrete, and heal me and forgive me please, I choose life. I choose life, and the unashamedness that comes with holy shame brought before you. Please being yourself into our work and words on shame and shaming.

Ps84 How lovely is the dwelling place of God, lovely in its loveliness because it is God's home, and our longing for home and dwelling is bound us with our longing for God. On this, Simon May in 'On Love' defined love as that which roots us, that by which we are at home, so defining his phenomenology of love in terms of a phenomenology of home, which I'm not sure of, but it draws us to thinking about a phenomenology of home. What is being-at-home and not-being-at-home like, really? This longing desperately faithing for the courts of God, and the joy of being-there where he is speaks of something of this. Let us nest close by you Lord, for it is so blessed, may we lay our young at your altar that they would experience your beauty from birth in this dwelling there is singing v2,4 surrendering v5,12 strengthening v5,6 supplication, shielding v9 and springing-up of life v6. Springs of living water, longed for, springs that spring up in the dwelling place of God, where we are to make our home. Oh lets let this be a psalm for the prayer room that will be.

Ps85-86 v8 Forgetful ones. Remembering our God is near. On which basis alone we can dwell poetically, and gloriously thus: v10-11 if we are spatialising Nature-and-Grace, it is a lover's embrace. Dear ones, this here is Holy Play, the interplay, that minglement of God among his creation. Balletically, romantically, God dwells, among us, This is the Holy entanglement we image and experience in Play. And so, warmed by the sun of righteousness, sapling faithfulness buds from the ground. Oh God is so involved. 86 v2 Godliness is a being and a doing: we Are his image bearers 82v6 but we avoid disfiguring that image only in so far as we Do trust that God is God. Trusting is a calling upon v7 is a lifting up souls v4 is a crying out v3. Trusting is prayer and a learning to pray. V11 Teach me to pray and to be one single-minded one in a unity of mind-heart-body towards a steadfast pursuit of the one thing.

Ps87-88 88 An honest psalm in times of acute distress, but also for the day-by-day and the now and for all these things in modelling desperation in prayer, persistence in prayer and faithfulness in prayer, actually. God make us desperate, persistent and faithful, alongside the joy, certainty and promise of 87. Let us take hold of this for London, and for our London, starting with our flock – v3 glorious things of you are spoken, oh city of God. May we know that we are citizens of Zion and so v7 sing and dance and excel creatively in every direction specifically and personally, bursting forth all into springs, springs of living water. Let's take this as a word to us specifically, this will be, let's take God at his prophetic promise.

Ps89 Our God v7, Our God, is an awesome, Awesome God, and singing of his love forever is how our psalmic days should start: the verse one of my penning January's ninth numbered day should be a declaration v1of a confidence in God's character ahead of all the day's yet unseen unhappened happenings. ... v15 Do you know the festal shout? .. Of prosperity, the counter point to Marks' ambiguous preaching in that way is a visiting the harder times with appropriate lament, as v38-51 ... v45 is my essay: we lose ornament to our naked shame for not having come as a playing youth.

texting psalms 42-72

2011-12-19T15:38:00.010Z

Poetry pslamming and that. Come seek a God who is there, withwards with words. Happily of a morning. 07729056452

Ps42 Pants. There are those who see breathless and knackered Christians staggering through a fruitless damaging Christian life. With one who sees such, last night was a long v3 'Where is your God?' conversation and a remembrance of throngs past. A Lk24v21 'We had hoped..' (Resurrection comes in tomorrow's chapter) Be lead, beloved and believe. We are the belead, lead by a Jn1v9 light full of grace and Jn1v14 truth. Hopesing all things for today, for us, for our households, for sober conversations with tipsy colleagues.

Ps43-44 43v3 'Send your light and your truth; may they lead me, and bring me back to Zion' – puts me in mind of what we wait for this advent. Waiting for Jesus, the explosively scandalously incarnate God. I feel like I only touch the hem of Jesus' cloak but I want to look him in the face, for I believe that Jesus is v4 the source of my happiness. Bring us back, God, bring us back to Zion, bring us back to the nativity scene. 44v1 The nativity scene is like this, as all the gospels, as every individual testimony – we've heard stories, but Jesus we desire that you walk off the pages of the text. you are v21 the God who knows our secret thoughts, you know who we love, how we hurt, how we bear false witness. you come to us, light and truth, among the mixed motives and schizophrenic emotions of the psalms, among questions, frustrations & sufferings let those we love see the incarnate God meeting us in these, especially those in church pain.

Ps45-46 Stirred and skillful, learnt and scriptural // here is a worshipping word: marital // In singing harmonic lyrics of love // Together Up In and Out we are of // a God we are known by // Oh God would we show thy // Wedding day allegories from above .. Form over function frequently in my poetic excursies. There are affirmations offered here to the He and the She which need not be exclusive or sufficient or definitive. But they are a necessary starting point, to speak these over the He's who would seek God in their gender, and the She's who would seek God in theirs. Prayers for He, v2 for grace graced lips, for a joy annointment, imparted gladness, v2/4 for humble handsomeness (vs vanity, vs contempt for his body) v4 for the leaving of travelling away from home in the defence of justice, v6 for the royal confidence and its respective submission to a duty to serve the gift of inheritance, v5 for the excellent targeted use of technology to achieve God's commission. And She, that she would know that she enthralls, you enthrall the King, you are a desired delight, embellish celebrate frame and declare, unambiguously, this is a body and person that God made v13 glorious, wonderful in its form, and for She, for companions, praying and wishing the excellence of this for you, against mere association of all the poisonous ways of gathering and cruel lonely unknownness, oh for sagacious discipling companionship, for wise women and their apprenticing an excellence in the tacit ways of womanning. 46 Very present help. Image this God. May we be present and very present to those who need help. Oh He is with us, He is God.

Ps47-48 Adoration first. God I do, I will, I will choose to worship you even if all else falls apart. You are God. 48 I read this Psalm on my birthday this year, in a time of desperate prayer. Cement these words in us God. This is a psalm for the desperate. Knowing our v3 v8 safety in God is sufficient for our being able to risk all things, you know? Hear this again. We are safe in God, we can risk all whilst smiling. Taking v6-7 out of context, thinking about maritime analogies vs birthing analogies (falling slowly playing in this afternoon's coffeeshop. God?) Let us embrace the hope and the fear of the birth metaphor for this time, teach us the risk, the adventure, of new things, of unknowns, of responsibilities. Speak into us what this metaphor means concretely in the present, in real life. Come Lord Jesus, thank you that you teach us patiently, thank you for being my fortress.

Ps49-50 Issuing a call for more riddling v4 hymns in our hymnal. The plated cake and Christianity's excellent answer to the question of suffering. We are not only free to choose to calibrate our suffering (as Buddhists) on an eternal scale, but we can flip the scale which measures suffering upside-down. Indulge me a little confectionery exploration. There is a relationship between cake on the plate and pie in the sky. Can we say that if we deny pie we will know not how to bake cake? Could we even say that the very ingredients of our cake are but pie crusts and crumbs that fall from heaven's table, that all culture is only a doggy-bag take-away trickle-down from the communion table? Outside of this metaphor, the 'understanding' that distinguishes v20 from v12, is a resurrection reality, and in that is a death-subverting, suffering-redeeming joy that surpasses all cake: our suffering redeemer who redeems suffering: the baked goods (Jn4v34) on his plate were shame, pain and death. Food and aforethought: let us plan for suffering, even let us plan to suffer. Ps50, briefly. As we do bread and eat suffering, let us never presume it is a duty paid to a God who needs performance. v12 He is the cake-baking, pie-making, all-sufficient One. Every other purveyor of cake and circuses is a fake, oh 49v14 sheep, beware the lights of London, beware the yeast of the Pharisees. Come Jesus to a ravenous London. Come Jesus, v12 unhungry one, give us today, make us today, be for us today our daily bread.

Ps51-52 Psalm 51 Oh everything I love about this God, truth in the inmost parts, truth deep in my bones, deep deep truth, deep mercy, deep love, unspeakable mysterious life. Oh joy and gladness, the old has gone the new has come. Keep us away from boring objectifying and that, keep us in your temple, keep our hearts broken and contrite and wondering at this beauty truth. So 51v10-12 repeated today, a sinner's prayer, again and again. 'Renew' has been the word of the day. New-ness, surprising and unexpected, like being in a foreign country, alive to the sights and sounds... & 'steadfast' – feels like the anti-thesis of (re)newness, if newness is a child-like unexpected pleasure, the steadfastness is a bit grown-up, it plans ahead and puts down deep roots. but oh, both of these. How these come together is a mystery to me, but they do, this is the life possible. God we need you more than breathing, this is why you cannot leave us, oh Holy Spirit, come close, to restore the joy of your salvation, remembering the freedom of this God. Sustain us, gifting us with willingness, a plea to remake us, reconfigure the architecture of our minds so our wills align with yours. Being here (52v8-9 be as a tree)

Ps53-54 54v4 Behold, God is my helper. When we are beheld, is God, conspicuously, our helper? Let us make public our predicaments, publish our problems, and live a life examined that 53v6 when, not if, God saves, God would get the praise. We live as demonstrations of our convictions, as demonstrations of the possible, before a watching, waiting, doubting, hurting world; a v3 fallen away world, an v4 ignorant world. We live in a God-made God-saved world. This needs to be said, this needs to be sung, this needs to be leant upon as flying buttresses in our plausibility cathedral, with a passion for its beauty and an urgency to its structure.

Ps55-56 The fear of intimacy is the fear of this, of abandonment, of love unreturned. There are wounded people all around us, betrayed by those they love, and wounded people wounding other people, and begeting wounded children. v22 God is the defender lover healer of this pain, and I feel in this our call to image God in being safe places for people, for being trustworthy, as God is v23 trustworthy. God let us be unforsaken unforsakers, the hands that hold the hands of those in relational pain. It is such a fearful thing, that which people can do to other people, both these psalms are full of warring. I am more exposed to BBC News 24 in this house than normal: our world is full of warring. Persecution, abuse and unkindness, and I am overwhelmed and afraid as 55v4-5 I want to hide from this volume of war: on why we wish for wings v6 like Conor's eagle in FishTank, escapism not real freedom. Jesus teach me neither flinching nor numbness to war, teach me to pray for a world at war, I don't know how to. v9-10 There are riots in this city, there is destruction inthis world. Let me not read these lamenting Psalms as a bourgeois individual existential angst, but a plead for deep mercy justice peace restoration for a world at war. There is no hope without God. But. There. Is. A. God. Christ the suffering servant, the prince of peace, Christmas miracle, we believe in you to make beauty from ashes. We plead that 56v13 the world would walk in the light of your presence.

Ps57-58 Till the storms. There is a memory of ones I have known who have been weathered by hurricanes, and they are marked by a right sense of awe. v8 Awake my glory. My glory, interchangeable with 'my soul', (with perhaps an emphasis more on the centre and pinnacle of your being, where 'soul', to my mind, connotes a certain sum of your invisible/visible parts?) People disbelieve in the soul, or at least problematise it, or at least neglect it. Let us speak with them of their glory, that which is noble in reason, infinite in faculty, admirable and angelic. That which, beneath woozy eyes and fickle heart, is there is them, albeit disfigured. So my glory is disbelieved, it can also be asleep. The process of waking profits some meditation. I, and neither my soul, am not a machine to be simply switched on. A spiritual rousing, a caffienating cold shower collecting of ones thoughts and arranging of the imagination's furniture, a flinging open of the eye's curtains, a muscle-stretching of the heart strings, a sun-warming on the skin. Awake my soul, in all of my sense and sense of the possible in God's world. 58 Refearing God, lest we forget. This passage is directed at the powerful v1 you gods, you mighty lords. This is not them, this is us. We, western white young professionals, are tyrants by default, unless-otherwise-stated, from the womb, v3, and we stop out ears v4, that by willed ignorance we might go on in comfort while the world that serves us goes to hell. Our privilege is not unrelated to the underprivileged. FishTank is real, is near, is within my power to alleviate, albeit in small ways. Boring Christianity internalises faith, domesticates God and trivialises injustice: By. Doing. Nothing. Oh God, awake my soul and put me to work among the nations. For joy.

Ps59-60 God, we give you thanks & praise, that when we were still far off, you met us in your Son & brought us home. We are far from you in our 59v2 evil, v3 cruelty, v4 hurriedness, v12 pride, false witness. We are like snarling dogs. And Jesus, you have come to transform this. You have heard the Psalmist's cry to 60v2 heal the wounds of the Earth, this is your project and purpose in Jesus (thank you), but you have not done so by the kind of destructive might envisaged by the Old Testament worldview 59v11 60v5. No, you saved, save, will save the world with the kind of vulnerability that makes possible a love that is stronger than death. Impossible extravagant God, we wonder worship marvel around the manger this morning, believing in our bones that everything is different because Christ was born, the universe has imploded and been made new again. From yesterday: Christ, who by his incarnation gathered into one things earthly and heavenly, fill you with peace and make you partakers of the divine nature; & the blessing of God almighty, the Father, the Son & the Holy Spirit, be among you and remain with you always. // So I am spoken to about the way that Bethlehem's birth is that through which the new earth and heaven come to be, through Jesus God makes our home and his the same, through Jesus we can imagine a starry London.

Ps61-62 Awake my soul 62v1/5 O wait my soul. Patience. Waiting when it is hard, waiting when it hurts, waiting when it is called foolish, we wait to listen, we wait to be stretched in faith, stretched out like pre-stressed concrete, we wait because true love waits, we wait because those who do renew their strength, we wait because waiting qua waiting anticipates and conspicuously speaks, to everyone who sees you on the platform, that you believe God's train will come. .. We are transitive verbs in transition. Playing with words perhaps muddies the truth I want to express. We are not faithing into the void, God is there, a rock. When I express, 'I trust God' (transitive) the God there is less than fully rockish in my sense of his substance. Would that I might become (transition) one who knows God as I know rocks, bricks and solid ground. .. God save the Queen 61v6 and prayers for our country. My neither/nor position of detached critique defined sceptically against the excesses of our state and the failures of capitalism take for granted that which is God-given in the peace of the governance of England, and hold in contempt the police and everything that works well. Pray with me against my tendency to unteachable scorn, aloof idealism and ingratitude in the face of social v10 riches. .. v8 Ever sing and daily vow. So this is public and worship, but what is a vow? How do we vow? What, actively, is our part in the covenant, daily? .. 62v2 He alone. There is a false refuge at play in the regressive immaturities that surface in me at home, and it is a running from (refugee) the battle of serving the parents well by speaking and strengthing such as to differentiate this season as their loving loved but undependent offspring. This is a desperate prayer, for growing up. My emotional sufficiency and grounds for bold adventuring must come from God first and should be sufficient from him if they were to come from him alone, because the gospel we preach with our lives must be good news to orphans. Have a phrased that without dichotomising? It is to fight escapsim in my life, that holds me back and indulges the fantasies of both me and the parents. Happy homes yes. But we are a mission home. We rest in God's refuge and eat from God's supply and it is urgent to do this conspicuously. Oh God, grow me up. Our refuge, rescue us.

Ps63 v1 God you are my God and I long for you, my whole being desires you like a dry and worn-out land, like the desert in need of water, like the Arctic tundra in need of sun. Longing, aching, hungry, thirsty, desperate. God we are desperate. I cannot pretend I don't long for you, need you. I do desperately do, it's the reason I cannot leave. v2 let me see you, please let me see you, let me glimpse your face to look you in the face, please be near, be close, do not be far off, please do not hide from us. Please let me touch you, brush my fingers up against you, v8 I cling to you, I need you, I need your assurance God, you are my safety. Nothing and no-one else will do. I cry out to you. My body knows it was made to worship a God who is real, my voice made to worship, we need you. My mind is small and cluttered and confused without you God, my heart heavy and oppressed without you, and v5 my soul starved without you. But v7 in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy. Oh I love to be here, shadow of God's wings.

Ps 65-66 There is a spiritistic worldview that considers all of nature to be animated by a host of spirits. The hills are alive here, and all of creation's tree's Is55v12 hands clapping and rocks Lk19v40 crying out are but a poet's inflection away from an Avatarian delight in a thoroughly personal universe. Avatar goes awry in divinising a closed system, but the personal universe, we live on the cusp of that allegory, the fulcrum of that head of a pin, the wire walked between heresy and vacuity, but there dance we. .. v4 Dwelling in your courts.. the goodness of your house. Nearness. Who has courts today? Is this language of proximity still current? God, we dwell in your zone 1? Perhaps/ We work for an alternative, redistributed nodality, but there is a centredness to our being-with God gatherings. Ours is a festival clustering, contrasted with the financial fortress clusterings of the City. 66V11,12 We and us. Let's sing about us, a Londonist hymnal. Let's tell a story that's not in an international style, not in a lowest common denominator language, let's write lyrics only we can sing, about somewheres only we know, irreducible Places. For everything that is bizarre and wrong with the Jerusalem hymn at least it frames the picture and asks the question: Did those feet? Did they build? Could we? Here?

Ps67 Still Jesus. Still Jesus, born to transform mercy justice. Still Jesus who tells us of the kindness of God. Still Jesus who sets about transforming us to that others take notice. Still Jesus who restores relationships, who is salvation itself, the hope of nations. This sixty=seventh for Jesus-centred missional dwelling.

Ps68 Evil melts like wax in the prescence of God. This is why I melt in the presence of God. (Even now, God, would you allow me close, confessing, to be me melted down again). This is why we cannot really come before God and stay the same, the heat of His holiness will destroy what we are, He can't but not, as in Ps22v14, my heart of stone melted down to be transformed into a heart of flesh Ez36v26, even now. This is a song of triumph, but one has to play, participate and perservere in order to taste this. The GNB translation of v13: “why did some of you stay among the sheep pens on the day of battle?” - Why did you do what was convenient but better good? Let's not be in the wrong place, let's be in the thick of it.

Ps69-70 Visiting Shame throughout, because persecution, fellowship and worship are all intersubjective. .. I find here: Zeal. Humility. Seeking. Thanksgiving. ~ which I have resisted manhandling into an ACTS correspondence, but it almost could... Zeal. Zeal v9 entails a profound shamelessness Rm1v16. Zeal's zealousness is somewhat like Marmite by analogy of distinctiveness. Love it, Hate it v4. Without [moral] cause. Perhaps our psalmist is not bated from a cause, but for a cause. Rebels without a cause delight to hate, and the zealous, by their marmite aroma, 2Cor2v16, present themselves for reproach v9 on God's behalf. Humility. The repentance of v6 recognises our unity as a church. As with church pain, there is also church shame, we are one body because we are all tarred with the one brush. So, repent, when you bring reproach, and remember, when you bear reproach, that we are not better than them. Seeking. 70v4 69v5. Let us be and be known as those who seek, who love, who hope, who seek: we are seekers Mt6v33, sought Lk9v10. .. Thanksgiving. V30 Magnifying glasses and the optics of making God visible. Sensitive seekers, with your senses seek him, pore (and pour) over his world, with wide eyes, that by the light in your eyes, he would be known.

Ps71 A Psalm for New Year's Eve, a prayer for the steady rush of days ahead, thankfulness for what has been, hope for the future, and desperate dependence in the present moment. God, thank you for all that is swept up in you, the womb's nurturing and the faithful grey-haired. Our necessarily intersubjective existence includes our being necessarily intergenerational, try as we might to escape it..prayers for our grandparents, parents, siblings, children. For those unborn for whom we will be especially responsible, for those so old we are especially responsible. v17-18 Thank you for what has been, please keep us faithful.

Ps72 When Jesus reigns in fullness, people will v16 blossom in the cities, ah. There is so much we cannot say about this fullness, about how (v7) the sun and the moon may be transformed, the fabric of existence so other than at present, but we can taste, embody, pursue taste something of the heavenly city: it's v12 deliverance, v13 salvation, v14 liberation, peace, recognition of the value of each life, v15 continual prayer, abundance and flourishing for all. Come, Lord Jesus.

200words: McElheny at Whitechapel

2011-12-04T10:27:00.005Z

“For now we see through a glass, darkly...” 1Corinthians 13:12a

McElheny gifts us with a kaleidoscopic remix of the end of history, a disbelieving backward glance through a shattered rear-view mirror. We, twenty-first century gallery goers, delight to piece together the glittery pluperfect remains of an abstracted past we don't even believe in?

“So either you can believe there is this thing called history, which is [...] a linear narrative with a definable thrust to it, or you could say that there's just a lot of different stories” Josiah McElheny, 2010

There is a lot of different stories. The safest story is the story of me, myself and my subjectivity: that on peering down the well of so-called history, we see only our reflected, storied selves staring back at us. The mirrors, which abound in this piece, reflect this notion of history while also conspiring to manifest a narcissist's rogues gallery?

“The more fearful this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.” Paul Klee, 1915

So, in a difficult world, as moths to a proverbial lamp, we cluster in galleries for the comfort of flickering globes and ambient sound, the therapy of an abstracted reality, for self-medicated hypnosis under the legitimating guise of high culture?

“..seeing one of these moths that have met their end in my house, I wonder what kind of fear and pain they feel while they are lost.” WG Sebald, Austerlitz p133

What images we do make out through the haze and fractures: the lightening strikes, lolloping storks, and corridors, are intriguing and beautiful, as glimpses into a hope deferred, a modernist's heartsickness, signs of a definable thrust? Dear ones, it's not too late to know, be known, and to be reconciled to our past.

“...but then shall I know even as also I am known.” 1Corinthians 13:12b

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/

texting psalms 1-41

2011-11-29T15:37:00.011Z

Text and texts will be given unto you. Come ascend the psalms of a morning with we. 07729056452.

Ps1-2 Psalt for preppers: be ready: bring a new new song for a new new wine. We come to the Psalms right on time, a prayerbook for a prayerful season. What are the chances? .. 1v1 Let us be the blessed nonscoffers if we possibly can. Oh God give us grace for that. Note the progression: whose counsel have I let in? What cause did I pause for? And where have I ended up sitting? Reverse engineer your seating plan. 1v2 The law must be read kept understood through the frame of delight. Delight and not duress. My meditation is this: Pharisees pacing about a dry empty swimming pool, muttering devising even celebrating that the water-tightness of the structure keeps out the elements.. Only we know, the water-tightness is to keep water in, so that we can play, swim and be delightedly buoyant. Delight that we have a reciprocal covenant of exclusive love with the God of everything, ridiculous aye. 1v3 Be as a tree in you metaphor and simile: an oak of righteousness, be green and full of sap in your old age, be a mustard 'tree' to nest in, be shelter and be shade. 2v1 Our intercontinental ballistic rattles thrown from the pram in a storm on teacup earth. It is laughable, in retrospect (a perspective God is able to take of past and future) how much energy we waste raging and plotting. 2v4 What sort of laughter? Surely a laughter of love. Would that I laughed at least as much as Tony. Laughing like kids in the playpool, entirely safe, haptically delighted, holy mischief makers. Oh to laugh at myself much today, for God's grace is more than a little ridiculous.

Ps3-4 4v4 I have been thinking about how my prayerfulness is helped and hindered by risings early or layings in bed, openness to learning to pray better asks for a re-examination of these. Let me ask 3v5 4v8 God be in our bedtimes, in our lyings awake, in our sleep, in our dreams, and our wakings to new days. In you, God to live and move and have our being, so be welcomed into our sleep lives. God our shield, safety and salvation, our glory and joy, be welcomed into this new day, I want to meet with you.

Ps5-6 Words: boasts v5, lies v6, flattery v9: sins of propagating unreality. Sins of thought and words indeed: failing the onefold by dualising? failing to have our yes be yes? failing to keep it real? failing to be steadfast as God is steadfast. God's steadfast love is our means 5v7 and our end 6v4, he is our beginning and our end. .. Beginning with morning sacrifice 5v3, before the day has happened, we expectant anticipate, pay-it-forwarding, confident to spend our first fruits first on him. .. Singing 5v11: Reverse engineer your singing plan, where singing is a fruit of confidence is a fruit of knowing you are loved is a fruit of pausing to sing. This is the virtuous cycle of tacit knowledge, of knowing through doing, of integrating faith and works. Sing to love to sing. .. 6v3 How long? How long will we not have for not having asked Jm4v2?

Ps7-8 Small meditations to bring forth trees of life.. God the judge, who searches hearts and minds, make me transparent.. Thank you for your glorification on the lips of children, let us learn.. What are human beings that you are mindful of us? Who am I that you care for me, know my name? Human beings, human beings, all around us today, these image bearers crowned a little lower than the angels, in the library, across the table, buying tube tickets. Let us glory to God by loving human beings, and being very fully human.. Dominion and dominioning and the urban landscaping, God? Glory to God, let us glory to God, glory glory glory to God.

Ps9-10 9v1-2 I will give thanks, I will recount, I will be glad, I will sing. Will I, will you, will we? Will I stand? Arms high? Heart abandoned? God willing, I will: future tenses risk a presumption of grace. God let me be faithful one more day, as in 13-14 the if-then and because for our worship is God's graciousness, his sustaining, his permission. .. 10 The silence v13 of a forgetful v11, hidden v1, distant v1, blind v11 God, who is not there v4, and does not care v5. Should we speak so when it feels such? {LACTS?] Our lamentable laments are shallow because we cushion ourselves with cheap grace and simulated salvation. The 'blacks' I mangled in last night's exposition might be these, the dark dark places on various spectrums, the extremities of God's apparent absence. Pray that I would cry better and more often, in better accord with the emotional range demanded by the scale of grace I have received.

Ps11-12 Topping and tailing with God's trustworthiness and our corresponding safety 11v1 12v6 v8 for 11v3 there is something for good people do when everything falls apart., and this is a trusting God. Reading Psalms after reading Job, the Psalmic and Jobic worldviews correspond here: God is so good. God we can trust and keep trusting.

Ps13-14 v3 Light up my eyes, light up my eyes, light up my eyes. To theologise sleep and so to both allegorise and practicalise. What is sleep? What is waking? How, practically can we rise like children, Tiggers for Jesus, on Christmas day every day.. Awakeness contrasted with a deathly sort of sleep, depressive day-sleeping, a curtain-closed numbness, the escapist dulling of the senses in an overindulged haze. My indulgences in bought and word and feed: in retail, in irony, in the gap filling saviour of comfort foods. Help me beyond help, save me. Oh God, rest us well, rise us well, rouse a fearlessness. Wake a waker within us, among us, for this winter time, as the darkness closes in. God we wait eagerly for your breaking dawn, we are now with Mary in her advent pregnancy. Come Lord Jesus Come. I need you. v7 Let Jacob rejoice, let Israel be glad. Let us? He has let us. So, let's. Let us. Lit eyes.

Ps15-16 Regarding security, both of these. v15 words and money, recurring themes, how they are patterned in our lives depends on our knowing (or lack of knowing) security in God. We should talk about this less abstractly soon. v16 secure in God's goodness we can bear the knowledge of our conscience. So I come to Psalm late at night, v7 in the night my conscience warns me. Not the angst of laying awake at night indulgently tortured or regretful, but conscientiously conscious of who we are to be made better. In favour of one's nighttime conscience, as with mirrors: because not all self-knowledge is self-indulgent... So lay us down to sleep, God, in holy knowledge. Thank you for v3 our community, v8 your presence, v9 our security in you, v11 you our joy.

Ps17-18 God our knight and day. v3 God our nocturnal mystery shopper: surely God was in this place. 18 v19 Have we our hands tied? So long we for release from the claustrophobia of our sin. v29 The Lord is my Matrix, my blue pill, my rabbit hole. By him we can take time to make time to bend time and walk on water. v35 By gentleness we are overcome to overcome. .. God's way v30 becomes our way v32 when we follow him down it. Blamelessness is in the following: we are that following following. Singing as we go.

Ps19-20 Sky yes. Today's confident cool blue. A sky with a purpose, not ad hoc and not unconstant. The sun with a happy purpose and a linear narrative, from one end of the sky to the other. God what a mystery. v12 No-one can see her own errors, deliver me from wilful sins, don't let them rule me, as they do. You can rule me, God, really. God in these thoughts, from the centre to the edge, reconfigure my thoughts and my imagination. I need a way of imagining Jesus so that he can rule me. 20 So trust. And trust, it begets hope.

Ps21-22 This the show-and-tell of Jesus' body broken: I'll tell my brother v22, our congregation v22, the world's end v27, unto a generation yet unborn v31. What are we telling? What have we been shown? Treasuring Christ and the call to suffer. I am called to suffer. That is my calling. To do hard things, bear heavy weights and stand in the way of bullets. Ps22 tells how and tells why. The how requires calibration and perspective. Calibrating our suffering against the innocent-sufferer-par-excellence here prophesied. And history's perspective's assurance v5 v9 v10 v21 v24 on which basis we have faith in future grace, and a vision for what will be achieved by suffering by Christ via ou bearing our cross in/of/as witness. Why am I so troubled this morning by the shortcomings in my theology of suffering? Fruitlessness and the fear of pruning perhaps? Yesterday's challenge's to risk: by Y regarding communication, by Driscoll regarding marriage and hospitality and by the Navs regarding Sabbath. Suffering is key. Indulge me in a little wander longer than a text is a sensible medium for. The cake-on-the-plate-while-you-wait corrective to an underrealised eschatology would be helpful if we lived in a Danish Lutheran fishing village before Babette. But we don't. Our generation knows no not-yet. And the why of our suffering and the pie in our sky is this: that Christianity would endure to our grandchildren's England. There is no cake in that, we will be dead. Part of me is convicted to take every comfort, luxury and advert-elevated-'need', and not to throw it away, and so become a Danish fishing village, but to throw them in to the Sabbath, The whole lot, meat cake espresso hot-showers lie-ins.. So by suffering their absence 6 days a week, we might image a heaven worth waiting for and create Sunday worth resting on. And this is not legalism, to delay gratification to heighten pleasure is hedonism. Enough. And I am being flippant in the light of Jesus body broken. v17, hear the sound of bones cracking today. The life we live is amazing. Bought at a cost. Grateful also, God, for my parents v4 who trusted.

Ps23-24 So the Lord is my shepherd. THE: the definite article, there is only one God. The LORD: and none else, no other idol, not myself, not these other gods, may it be. IS: not a might be or a was or a will be, but present, definite, matter of fact. MY: even mine, even me, for I am know, not as impersonal data, but as a lover, mother, brother. And also in this the call to our always choosing – something of the truth of existentialism's dread, our kirkegaardian on this God I stake my life. SHEPHERD: Jeus the good shepdherd who lays down his life for the sheep, I want to imagine you thus, the sheep know hiw voice, because he gathers us, cares, keps, intends good for us, sacrifices, risks for us. I know Jesus loves me, because he risked himself for me. Thinking about Otford's sheep, there is something honest and uncomplicated about the shepherd-sheep relationship, though it may be hard. Hard but not complicated. So I shall not be in want, because the Lord is my shepherd and he alone is sufficient. And surely goodness and mercy will follow me. They are not hidden in boxes under the sand, they follow me where I go astray. God pursues the grumpy with goodness and mercy, one over one shoulder, one over the other. Remember as you walk today, this is the grace-full universe we live in. So God's house will be my home all my life, 23 to 24 and God's house is the earth, cake on the plate. But this poem full of the not-yet also, God is still coming, we are not complete, so prepare, prepare, for your unrealised pie, fling wide the gates, prepare a way in the desert, for all of life in an advent.

Ps25-6 v2 Trust vs Shame, v3 Waiting vs Shame, v20 Refuge vs Shame. Not sure that I am being terribly profound, simply to say we are safe inside a steadfast beloved unashamed shamelessness.. v7 Remember God's great forgettery. Tattoo it on a friend. .. v14 Friendship. We should image this mode of our relationship with God, against facebook's damage done, oh to be a friend, substantially, unambiguously. .. In that vein. v15 Pluck us from the net. .. 26v12 I'll link you to McCracken on Tebow. Shameless unirony. God, let me be so simply Christian in a single-minded pursuit of excellent witness. Psalms in the evening dredge the day's detritus, it is a different experience. God, forgive forget what I have been and done.

Ps27-28 These Psalms need to be read aloud, read them aloud to remind of our embodied dwelling in the house of God, words from your body to your mouth to spoken declaration. v4 There is one thing I want, to dwell in the house of God. Dwell dwell, with heart body mind soul strength, deeply. Dwell with every footstep and every word. v8 Hear God calling us to worship. Let us, let us settle into worshipful ways, dwelling in God's presence, here now, in all these tasks, transformed by templing. The Psalms connect worshipful delight in God, pleas for salvations and the pursuit of wisdom. From beginning to end 27v1 God my light and salvation, 28v9 the Lord is still my shepherd. We dwell in him.

Ps29-30 the bigger your notions of God, the more offensive Jesus' claim to be him. Our God is a great big God. Jesus was a nobody from a nowhere with nothing. Just like us. We have a great big God within us, among us, for us. This by his voice, which is our voice, if only we would. Let us with creative voices speak urgently his healing, proclaim boldly his kingship, and advocate justice, and imagine the possible, and speak a storm of hope, a flood of love and rebuild a word-damaged world:You are forgiven. It is finished. We are free. This our banner, these our bricks, this our medicine, these our roadmaps. O saints sing! Dear saint, beloved, believe in the blodd nought freedom you've been set free for.

Ps31-32 32v2 Blameless, 31v7 Beloved, this is for sharing, let all those we love stand under these banners. 31v12 the fear of being forgotten, as she of the end of Life In A Day, the pain of much church pain, the vulnerability of love. God in gathering today would we demonstrate that you, the God who forgets sins, does not forget anyone. Gather all near in unforgotten knowness, so for knowing, as we are fully known.

Ps33-34 v1 Befitting. It is right to give him thanks and praise. Right for him, right for us. This is our right (and our joy), it is what we deserve (apart from death wages) 34v1 and 1Th5v17 Continually. That irony might not get a word in edgeways. v3 Together. As FirstAidKit, as the Laurels, as those Life In A Day ladies hammering out the grain, let us live with polyphonic glee inviting all to join our chord, the welcome enclosure of notes between, and so expertly executed, and so deliberately together. 34v5 Radiance. Lit eyes. Where I have seen this in others, I have longed to know Christ their way. Turn us out, turn us on, lights to worlds, cities on hills. God, ablaze might we be, eyes affixed on you and hearts affirmed. Alight us, aflame us. Come Jesus, rescuer, rescue me.

Ps35-36 God fights for us. Protect us today, oh Lord, protect us together and apart, protect us from the evil that comes against us, & protect us from ourselves. Confessing that I am wicked, that I am 36v4 one who makes evil plans whilst lying in bed, I am prompted to pray in the morning for the day ahead, and in the evening for the night. Forgive me, & protect me from myself, for I am my own worst enemy. 35v2 God's armour, let us this morning consciously put on our Eph6v10-18 armour, to battle evil, to risk romance adventure journey, fight for all that is holy, & so be all we were made to be, knowing that truth drives our falsehood, righteousness destroys my own wickedness, readiness is quicker that complacency, faith proves itself strong, our salvation is the safety we live from, steep in God's words. That you God for your 36v5-12 constant goodness love righteousness justice care.

Ps37-38 Fret not. Lk2v10etc Fret not. Ph4v6 Fret not. Stealing a host of Piper's pictures of the unfretted Christian life, I would adjure us thus: be coronary Christians, (vs twitchy adrenal), and put ballast in your boat, place your feet on a concrete platform just beneath the waves, be sages, deep rooted oaks. Be chill. And know. .. I have this morning attempted a bridge between this fretting and last night's fleeing discussion. Bear with me. What flees? The healthy flee a plagued town, a dog flees the kicking of a cruel master, the lazy flee hard work, the naked flee sight, the anxious flee fright, escapists flee generally, and, I think, most usefully in this discussion, the hungry flee famine. I should like to establish this as an understanding of the Devil's flight. It is a flight from pain to pleasure along a path of least resistance. This is why we resist. We have something the Devil needs and we can withhold it. The devil, can we construct the devil as incomplete, an unstable isotope, a starving parasite? We have in Ps37 v19 and v25 the image of God's nutritious supply, and within this dynamic of sustenance, I will hop skip and a jump via Mt4v1-4 to our Jm 4v7b. Fretting not is trusting God is feeding on him is resisting the Devil is starving him is putting him to flight. Another way: either we can feed on God Jn6v35/53 and so feed his sheep Jn21v15/17 OR we can feed on our sick 2Pt2v22 and so be devoured by the Devil 1Pt5v8 (and each other Gal5v15). Resist the Devil, feed on God. And what is feeding on God? Doing his work Jn4v31. And what is his work? Mt16v24. Thus Christ's pièce de [peaceful] résistance is the cross. Let us. Fret not. With apologies for mixed metaphors.

Ps39-40 The conflictual emotions expressed throughout the Psalms (39v12 'come near me..leave alone.) Is not be celebrated so much as understood it. We are to know when to be silent, and 39v2 when not to. On the value of questions, complaints and honest expressions of emotion communicated rather than repressed and left to grow at the back of the mind, becoming bigger than they are. Rightly we are to critique an understanding of authenticity that is simply 'doing what I want' but this is not what this is, this is an articulation of feelings explicitly in the presence of God, to make sense of them, to seek God in them, with them, through them, & depsite them, intentionally. Forgive me thoughts repressed, God, teach me helpful communicative articulation of difficult and painful emotions before you. Let us be Jacobs wrestling and let us not romanticise this wrestling. Brought to mind Lauren Winner's description of her conversion as admitting that she'd been fighting with Jesus in the way that one fights with someone you love. Honest wrestling makes a way for 40v1-2 salvation, safety, singing. Yes yes let us sing together, let us sing together. These circling pleas and praises, a spiralling deeper into God. v6 God today, give us ears to hear you, whatever is specific to hearing your speaking spokenness, let us be attuned and attentive. I mean it, here I am, here we are.

Ps41 v1 Faith works and salvation by social action. There is no need to problematise this so. I need to be reminded that it is by positioning myself to serve the poor amongst the poor for the poor, there will I find blessing, and from the open handed, hands-out-of-pockets, heart abandoned position am I to receive blessing, unknown in another place or position. At some level serving is its own rewards, the joy of cooking, at some level serving creates a rewarding return, the investment in community, and at some level there needs to be a reward that comes as you give yourself to death, the reward that God will meet you there and you will never outgive him.v7 Whispering and imagining the worst. Let us rather, speak plainly and imagine the best best.

200words: 33 bond street

2011-11-16T21:54:00.004Z

When in Rome, the insecure become Greeks to the Greeks, second-handers, emperors with no clothes but new clothes; as such, the clotheshorses and the celebrity art buyers of Bond Street unveil here a nostalgic tragic Trojan conceit: social injustice has always been a timeless way of building. The haves and the have-nots have nothing in common, except the view over the brinks of the chasm in the recession wrought landscape which now divides them, and on this side, the Mayfairer side, the revivalists are resuscitating old oligarchic structures, while the 99% grin in their vendetta masks and bear market it. In the post-post-modern world we revisit the past without irony.

Too much, too strong? Definitely too oblique.

With regrets I couldn't get inside, I enjoyed this handsome addition to Bond Street, the confidence of its stone composure, the pictures in the picture window, the unstriving sense of proportion, the playfully handmade handcrafted claim that things can yet be done well by humans in a technopolised world. The lighting design is mysterious, showy and counterproductive. Why highlight, with grazing-incidence uplights, the warp and joints in the stone columns and not light the frieze? Many whys. And whos and hows?

http://www.richard-green.com
http://www.adamarchitecture.com/

200words: postmodernism at the v&a

2011-11-05T23:09:00.004Z

“And when he heard this, he was very sorrowful: for he was very rich.” Luke 18v23

Postmodernism is at once eminently exhibitable, being image-based and knowingly conceptual, yet at the same time it resists any comfortable boxes necessary for a coherent exhibition. A narrative imposition is needed, and fortunately our subjects, the PoMo set, with their cinematic bent, lend themselves to being fashioned as protagonists within an heroic narrative. So, we journey with these young provocateurs emerging from self-made ruins, through pseudo-ruins, unto the wealth of Disney's megastructures built with a Sebaldian eye to their future existence as ruins, (and finally we visit Ai Wei Wei's ruins rebranded). Sorrowful stuff. We are a curious breed of mischief makers, writing our histories before we have finished, picking over the corpse while it is not even fully dead; the curator's unhappy task of post-justifying the adolescent fumblings of post-modernism poses the complicating difficulty that post-modernism is still current as a philosophy and question. Protection is available by constraining it to an era, consigning it to a style and by ascribing it to periodised social-economic factors. Symptomatic of this, I am now writing about lecturing about exhibiting about drawing about architecture, illustrative perhaps of the over-thought intellectuality of post-modernism.

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/postmodernism/
img: flickr

texting job

2011-11-05T20:19:00.008Z

Testing Texts. If you'd like to help us out of a morning. 07729056452

Jb1-2 Job, more than the right response to every prosperity theology, but to every way in which we think we can make God's agenda fit our own in virtue of doing it right. Noticing for the first time 1v5 Job the parent, as I think a little on a theology of parenting. We should offer sacrifices for our children we are to play a part in raising, because they are given to us to be responsible for. Parenting together so that no-one parents alone, an unconditional love for children involves a radical Levinisian asymmetry of responsibility, let us learn better the cost of this, the sacrifice to be brought. So anyway, God and Satan and that.. why do we love God? For the sake of fear or pride or intellectual apathy? For the sake of an easy label? For a superstitious reward? If community & marriage & children & friendships were taken from you. If your happy home & your good health fell apart. If all hope of good work were denied you. If your mission proved to be a dead end, if all your gifts went to waste. Would we still love God? Would we? Let us try to glimpse out of the corner of one eye what it means to say that we have no rights and that grace is sufficient. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord.

Jb3-4 ESVSB: Job is not suicidal. And neither am I, only let all of reality be different.. We do laments an injustice if we psychologise them, or as The Matrix's Cypher program an ignorance for them. The case Melancholia makes for the sanity of those who recognise the futility of things almost has mileage, and yet, and yet.. The image of being hedged in here 3v23 should be recognised as God's good greenery 1v10, and as we walk this path it is less The Shining's maze as it is a labyrinth prayerfully walked towards God and step by step scripturally illuminated by God. .. As a correction to our use of irony, which we employ to talk around hard and painful things, let us learn to lament, and so let our oh no be oh no. First rue what might have been in order to hope that it might yet be. Let us be lament-able, so to heal, so then to weep well with those who weep.

Jb5-6 Distilling a three point sermon from an anguished stream of consciousness is possible only up to a point, much of this text is to be entered as a poem, I think, let us dance a little. There is a conversation here, a dialogue, an exchange of worldviews: unabstracted because it is Job's own reality in question, his frame of reference, the meaning of his meaning. Are all dialogues about what God is like, really? This is a conversation about justice, about salvation, about whether God is a God who answers. When circumstances challenge our world view, which they will, what gets transformed and what remains? This is the way of a difficult I-Thou wisdom. Some conversations will not be life-giving, let us not believe we've found streams of living water where we haven't. But let us continue to ask, examine, speak, listen, in the hope of seeing God's face. What did we learn?

Jb7-8 Is it problematic that Job is 'blameless' 1v1? So for us who sinfully sin, where all sin is infinitely deserving of judgement separating us from an infinitely pure God, then no suffering is undeserved. In which case, the rebuke of these so cold so-called-comforters is right, we are in the v4 'hands of our transgressions'. But. But what if we are blameless? Eph1v4, Rm8v1.. Then Job's words can be ours? On this basis we can confidently go forward against systems of suffering which stake a claim to our lives (or claim a stake in our lives. Tangents..) When accused by voices within, when despondent, when called to account, we can give an account of the way Christ bought our blamelessness. In this he strengthens us Rm16v25. Let us Live today in all that we already are. Blameless and beloved. Blameless and beloved. Blameless and beloved. Overcome with gratitude, we will overcome.

Jb9-10 God the other, God the wholly other, God the holy other. Ranting and reality, with perspectivism's permission: I know my heart and will speak my mind before this God, knowing that my heart is not the measure of all things, God's otherness not reducible to my small epistemology. So 9v35 returns to v3 in a virtuous circle. & in this form let us return to remember our belovedness, formed in the womb with care and intent 10v8-12 (Is45v9-10) and our blamelessness transformed by Jesus 9v31 becoming Rev19v8. Blamelessness & belovedness speaks the end of 10v22's despair, there is no no-way-out, no inescapable darkness, rather: Jn1v9 inescapable light.

Jb11-12 Why is Job in the bible and as long as this? Is it a measure of our resistance to God's sovereignty? Is it a measure of our presumption on God's sovereignty? Either way it will not let us rest. We see in Job's comforters unmercy justice taken to its logical conclusion. This is a position it is possible to hold by omission, that is, in not feeding the hungry we express a Zopharian conviction that they deserve to go hungry; in not preaching the gospel we express that they deserve to go on in ignorance.. Rom1v14 Unto the gift of grace we are obliged. If we only know how undeserved our life is it would render inaction impermissible. Let us fight our own proclivity to passivity which would have us laze in a because-i'm-worth-it cheap grace. Undeservedly blameless, undeservedly beloved. For the joy. x

Jb13-14 The lines between fruitful dialogue and unhelpful argument can be easily blurred aye, this is something I need wisdom for. 14v1 We are all born weak and helpless – so I have been reading this week, with an academic analyst's spin..all these questions, incredulously probed mysteries of birth and death, these belong to us all, we are surrounded by people asking these. And we believe with Job 14v15-17 that we have found the place to ask these questions, a God who transforms them. Forgiveness changes everything.

Jb15-16 Do you fight 'injustice'? Do you protest your 'plight'? Do you defend your conduct and their consequences based on your understanding? Do you claim to understand? Do you know anything, let alone enough to claim that the balance is misweighted? Do you presume to pray? What are you praying against, as if you had not received, by breathing, more than you could possibly repay? You do not know the half of your shame, you do not know your debt. How much of my talk is v3 unprofitable, and my fat is v27 the defence of a proud God-disregarder, and my pre-ruins are v28 the habitations of the postmodern wicked. On shame and the over emphasis of total depravity: it is easy to caricature Job's comforters, their language of shaming is powerplay, however, without an unpayable debt there is no Christ-shaped-hole. We should heed the tutting of the v10 grey-haired, but then out-Live them. Uncondemned Blameless Beloved. You are.

Jb17-18 Thinking about 17v6 the use of proverbs, soundbites and tidy theological formulations as weapons. These ostracise those whose experience falls outside their prescription. God is the God of the real so doctrine without experience is empty, (experience without doctrine is blind). This is why we listen. Oh and 18v4? God might just move mountains for us, actually. Grace comes extravagantly.

Jb19-20 v3 The shame of shamers is their presuming the right to judge, this presumption invariably leads to false accusation. ESVSB links this with Dt19v19 which decrees false accusers should themselves serve the sentence which they pronounce on the other, so obv Mt7v1. If our lives are false gospels, false witnesses and presumption manifested in unsympathy, apathy and social disengagement, then we will be visited on by unhappy judgement? v23 Publish when you are damned, when you are at your lowest point, when faith is needed most. The faithful write their biographies before they are triumphantly concluded because they know already that their story ends well, because they know these things will be resolved, because they Know their redeemer lives. Our redeemer lives. 20V27-8 In this way, by living these stories, by writing them, we integrate seen and unseen realities, making true on earth that which is true in heaven.

Jb21-22 Sort of that sadness here, of different people all seeking God and yet concluding differently. .. There is so much truth in Bildad's accusation. .. 22v25-7. So I like the honesty & complexity of this book. Knowing as we do, how this story end, the thing to do when in disagreement with holy people is to keep seeking, keep praying, keep talking, keep listening, as we do things, even to the end of time. 21v21 when our lives are over do we really care whether are children are happy? Phrased as cynical rhetoric we might transform it into one benchmark for our attitude towards stewardship & all we leave to the next generation, how we parent, how we cultivate life and Life.

Jb23-24 v8 God on mute. Is he ever? Or has our Jesus film just been poorly dubbed? Or are we simply hard of hearing? .. 24v3 “They” [who put angels in the electric chair..] - Who are 'they'? Why do they persist in history? 24v18-20 “You say..” - Who is 'you'? This is the 'you' of the them-and-us of all church pain. The Jobic dimension of church pain is: graceless comforters confronting the problem of evil in the face of suffering. 24V13-8 Those who dwell in darkness have likely been on a night-shift. The question of what is done at night and the morality (/sustainability) of a 24hr society is a current one for one here roused at 3am to arbitrate just such a dispute. We are silly men. .. Though the darkness closes in, Lord, still I will sing: v10 God knows. Our blamerless belover, he knows. Our redeemer, he knows you, he sees your best, you are the apple of his eye.

Jb25-26 Inescapable light 25v3 there is no place where God's light does not shine. As James told us last night, Jm1v17 God is the creator of lights, God does not cause darkness. And Jn3v18-21 the light has come into the world but people love the darkness..we fear light because we fear our evil deeds will show up. We fear shame. Shame is exposure, vulnerability, pain. Shame is an experience of our v6 worthlessness. But back to John we are blameless and beloved, because, here, of Jesus. Jesus is shame's healing, before Jesus we can be exposured, vulnerable and loved into freedom. It is the tone of Bildad's words that are not truthful, rather than their content .. They have a 'you can run but you can't hide' God as a Hollywood villain. But rather: you can't hide, as shame would have you do, you can't hide, but the light inescapable is all love. Seen & loved. Seen & loved. Seen & loved.

Jb27-28 The wicked wicked are to get their comeupance? This Bildadic 27 is perhaps hyperbolic-ironic, perhaps intended to emphasise the wickedness of self-righteousness, perhaps to be framed in terms of v8 judgement after death? .. Now, 28, slowly sumptuously. Wisdom is. The whole bodily experience of mining bears some meditation. The intrepid, in far flung places, beneath the surface, with strength for faith to risk for a reward. Dig deeper gold diggers, treasurehunters, London our rockface, Oval our seam of: localist wisdom, natural knowledge, experience, persons saving persons saved. // The bible our rockface, and early mornings are dark places we go to find rich things: doctrine to see by, doctrine to sow with, we mine the iron here with which we form a plough to turn the soil above? Wisdom out there, wisdom in here. And what is wisdom The particulate and the precious. Let us make our home an NHM rock room.

Jb29-30 Injustice will befall us, at some scale at some time. Why do we think that a good week will be followed by a bad week? Not because God is like karma, and not because God is not to be trusted. Rather, God is to be trusted, without condition, when bad follows good follows bad, which it will, in some way. Let us not dwell in the past as 29 but turn to God in the present, 30. If only sometimes to weep. God is here.

Jb31-32 To covenant with my eyes: the theology of thought-crime and self-covenance in one. Guard the ports of your mind, rigorously, accountably. There are sins we admit, commit and omit: sins that we let in, let out and let go: be sure to let the right ships in. .. If. If I have not filled every minute with 60 seconds of distance run, I repent. .. Elihu: don't self-justify, for it is God who justifies. You cannot but protest too much. Oh holy fools and Elihus, come, and call us to account, call us out of our self-deception. .. v22 “I do not know how to flatter..” One day, God-willing, I will forget how.

Jb33-34 Found in here, imperfectly, adoration 33v26, v30, confession v27, thankfulness v28, and supplication (ish) 33v1, 34v31. So prayerfully and more prayerfully to 33v14 listen, v15 dream dreams, vision visions and v17 be so radically transformed. Prayerfully today.

Jb35-36 ESVSB: “Again, he seems more arrogant than he realises, as young men sometimes do.” Elihu's wisdom has limits, and what truths he does manage unsympathetically to express are invalidated by Job's blamelessness. But. Helpfully these: 36v5 God's sovereignty, which is ultimate power of infinite knowledge of power: God knows, he know the backstage of the backstage, he knows the context's context, he knows and alone justifies. So rest. 36v15. The disciplinary function of suffering: true even for we saved. I want to insert a discomfort vs 'suffering' clause in this discussion. In love God opens our ears, uncomfortably? 35v12 The proud oppressee and the problem of feminism: isms predicated on the unjustice of victimhood go awry by pride? This can only be uttered internally, because one can only call oneself to radical meekness. We compound our sin by the pride of claims to deserve a wage other than death. .. And yet and yet. In Christ we have that wage paid. This whole Job problem of blamelessness should be our daily amazement. No suffering the suffering of meaningless blind suffering, only refining, only hoping, only reforming. Everything we ache now is God drawing us into his likeness. There is nothing to run from. On this basis, as we have strength, let us look to bear another's pain. Love my love to love this Tuesday, be eyes wide open.

Jb37-38 37v7 Bring me to a stop. v14 to pause. Prayerfulness is a stopping constantly, within a doing and a going about. My prayerfulness is a fumbling because I have not let this now-platitude about pausing soak deeply into my being, for I am still ugly noisy clatter chatter. v21-22 sky sky sky and the glory of the God who is real. For 38v12 it is God who commands the day to dawn, the sky to splendour light and colour. And here is the God who is real, who speaks, before whome there is shivering smiling silence at this mystery. God the imaginer, creator, sustainer, lover and sharer of all that is good and true and beautiful. God who walks in beauty. I submit surrender soak. God of mysteries we love you.

Jb39-40 The problem of extinction, domestication and the David Attenbrisation of our encounter with a wild God from the comfort of our settee. Let us strive against over-familiarity with nature by seeking unmediated encounter. .. The colours of the winds and the limits of pantheism's natural wisdom. There are somethings to be learnt from the bird who do not sow (and the lilies who do not sew) chiefly in the area of unanxiety. We as behemoths before turbulent waters, but not because we are strong, but because he is. .. Shall a faultfinder contend with God? Am I, do I? What an occupation it is critical we lay down. Critical. Not a tame lion, aye, can we build our epistemologies on that. For the fun, for the joy, for the wonder.

Jb41-42 Would I write more poems, on present mysteries, to the glory of God. Divine conclusions... This book offers little from a detatched third personal perspective, it only works as an engaged first person meditation in discovery of a second personal God. Job only works if God is real and if God speaks. But see hear.. 42v5 in the past I only know what others had told me about God,not God is closer than breathing, not I have seen for myself. A God who shows himself amidst evil & suffering's reality with his own sufficiency and the capacity to bring new life. This hope changes everything: restoration.

200words: occupylondon

2011-11-05T14:17:00.009Z

i'm preoccupied.

five, already awake, wait, muffled alarm, tiptoe round mitch, kettle, tea, nehemiah's eleventh, one in ten to live in the city, one in ten tents occupied, trust we the telegraph?
i'm preoccupied.

five-thirty, texting texts, emails, gatti, geri, small world, this city, a global age, a globalised good?
i'm preoccupied.

six, pre-packed paniers, dark, outside, wet, switch, light, keys, lights, cleats, clicked, clapham road, waterloo bridge, streaks of taxi headlights, glistening tarmac, and there. where london's dark streets shineth, was it a night like this? did the Word tent so among us? john1:14
i'm preoccupied.

six-thirty, canvas clusters bask in an eerie glow, reminds me of geri's, all tulips budding, in plastic tents, under floodlighting, beyond utrecht, pregnant with protest's possibility, this their winter, when their spring?
i'm preoccupied.

pedal, pedal, trafalgar square, pedal, bond street, pedal, bond street again, how long have i lived in london? lost in shopping, is this a parable for the problem? regent street, and i've gone too far, haven't we all?
i'm preoccupied.

seven-ten, late, the one i love, pain quotidien, is this 'quotidien'? is this the problem?
i'm preoccupied.

'what did you see?', had i but eyes..
i'm preoccupied.

(27.10.11)

http://occupylondon.org.uk/

texting esther

2011-10-30T09:49:00.007Z

Tricky texts. 07729056452

Es1-2 Meekness is not weakness. .. Problematic passages this morning. What is the beauty of a woman for? You should ask this, why am I beautiful? For it is a form of power, it is a currency, it is a gift, it carries consequences. There is the question equally for men, perhaps given less mileage in Esther, to what end is their strength? .. We have a portrait here of a culture not unlike our own. With any culture we can absorb+assimilate, we can reject+escape, or we can engage+subvert. What do we do with a culture's gendered notions of sexiness and strength? Vs a chauvinist tyrant Xerxes, Mordecai the meek seeks to save the King's life anyways, confident that God will vindicate him. Vs Vashti's aggressive bid for feminism, Esther the meek seeks a culture's favour complying with the powers that be, confident that God will vindicate her. How should we then live? These are uncomfortably non-purist provocations. Meekness is not weakness.

Es3-4 Haman and Mordecai offer pictures of ourselves, our mixed motives, poles of what we could be, could we decide who our God is – ourselves, or the true God? Hamanian hubris begets pride, alienation from the other, isolation, violence. Vs Mordecai the brave, the secure, the humble. The king and Haman sitting down for a drink while the city was thrown into pain and confusion initially reminds of bankers in trendy bars so alienated from the consequences of their actions, the chaos around. But this will not do to blame bankers – it is my actions, my compliance, these consequences. Esther the brave makes a commitment, a covenant: speaking out her intent so that she can be held to account for that which has convicted her, that which she has promised. Let us speak our convictions to each other that we can hold each other to account, then let us fast and pray for each other. I cannot do this alone, I need my community.

Es5-6 For such a time as this, and with such an attention to timing as this. Wait, watch and pray, fast, wait. At one level patience and associated non-violence are true truths, but even this 'god'-less passage won't let us rest there, these are Jew truths 6v13, because of specific revelation we are free to be so bold. If only we would. There was a JP talk in which he advocated Life Course inviting motivated by a basic self-interest, that is evangelism for the sake of survival, because time will come, unless we act, when Christianity will be illegal in this country. Insofar as there is truth in this, Esther is a model of a Godly application of self-interest. Not so much that we-are-going-to-die-anyways, but rather that the good life calls us into such as drama as this. Oh dramatically to live and expect much of God today, this Tuesday.

Es7-8 Of 8 this seems like a strange victory in many ways, it is a victory constrained by the limits of bureaucracy, the well I've signed the forms now sorry, nothing I can do about it – only create a further, reactive legislation that begets war rather than peace. Maybe we should take from Esther's story that victories within the system, on the system's terms, can still be understood & celebrated as victories. But how much better a changed system, a transformed understanding, rules remade rather than elaborated ad infinitum. Jesus, teach us how to engage & subvert. Skipping back to outing oneself as identified with this God, this is powerful. With every new meeting we are coming out of the Christian closet. How we do it is powerful, it will change things. So today, so today's conversations.

Es9-10 If we are to apply this, who are the Jews, who the Hamen? For God is not a tribal deity (if he ever was?) Rm3v29 or even Jn2v4. Who then? Hamans as the world, the flesh, the devil? But yet his kingdom is not of the world Jn18v29 and our battle is not in the flesh Eph6v12. I am mixing my metaphors? Are we our own worst enemy? If in the cause of non-violence we spiritualise/allegorise/internalise Esther to such as extent that we relativise the universe out its very real theses and antitheses then we will lose the foundations for the drama of the good life. I have said nothing to answer who the Hamen and how? .. Legislation used excellently, obligatory feasting, gladness and social justice. There is a relationship between sabbathing's best and a community's submission to a coordinating synchronising authority.

texting nehemiah

2011-10-25T15:09:00.004+01:00

Come text, without money, without price. Our life dialogical is yours if you like. 07729056452.

Ne1-2 More lamenting. This is a way God's heart is known to us. Sometimes there need be no struggle in discerning the right and the good, for the Holy Spirit breaks out in us a lament over brokenness, which should be resource and motivation enough. We cannot be accountable for what we cannot discern, but to fail to respond to God's prompting is to be ugly and small and dead. To seek God only to not see it through is the greatest tragedy perhaps. Nehemiah demonstrates that faithfulness begets faithfulness and is possible. Stop doubting, and believe. God in our proclamations, God in our secrets, God in our sadness, God in our work..

Ne3-4 Of 3, there is a redeeming of work, when it is done so, rather as Cool Hand Luke sanding the road, there is a rhythm to the muscling in alongside, above him and the other and after and then and so. Oh a rush and a push, dear brothers and sisters.. Then, of 4, of that which is true in pantomimes, Sanballat he's behind you.. We live in such a world, where we would do well to see in higher contrast the forces that conspire to 'cause confusion' by force of weapons of mass muddling, by an assault on language itself.. That our yes should be yes is a military imperative. So, with courageous unambiguity, go, be unconfused in this: our God is great and awesome, he is, he is, he is, and our God will fight for us, he will, he will, he will. So build, rebuild, the unbuildable.

Ne5-6 I feel like I'm reading Nehemiah anew. I forget this hero of faith, a model of one who convicts, communes and compassion cares for with those with whom he shares his life and work. Able to speak authoritatively about the wrongness of wrong, and able to model and instigate a better way. This is a way to walk in, the forfeit of our own rights, the cancelling of debts owed to us, the sharing of our food, a happy feasting image. To honour God thus is to take part in saving the world. This a hard road, people tried to kill him y'know. But what a way. Let's let's.

Ne7-8 Should we number ourselves? Being and times-tables.. We should number ourselves, in accountancy-as-worship, for by numbers God makes himself faithfully known by his promise to multiply. .. 'Faithful and God-fearing..' necessary and sufficient to govern a city. .. Celebration. God is this and not that, here and not there, he inspires and enables, event and place, specific and intentional. We, exiles, ought to celebrate, to re-centre our identity in The God who laughs Ps2v4, The God who rests Gn2v2, The God who dresses the lilies Mt6v30. Today reading Gottfried Semper: “..to perpetuate commemoratively a festive or religious act.. ..the idea for monumental art was in an analogous manner suggested by similar festive celebrations.. ..improvised scaffolding.. ..special splendour and frills that indicate more precisely the occasion for the festivity.. ..draped with carpets, dressed with bough and flowers.”

Ne9-10 Go through looking at all the divine verbs, summarised by v9 'heard' and v13 'spoke'. This is what I hope to articulate today, the God relationship is intersubjective, dialogical and alive, and this changes everything. Keep us alive and unabstracted in conversation with you, God, in confession, praise, remembrance and promise, responding to your creation, care, covenant, keeping. In thought, word and deed.

Ne11-12 What is a wall? Why do we sing? Where is Jerusalem? Who should we station there? Interesting that the Telegraph reports only one in ten tents at occupylondon is slept in. Perhaps a tangent. But the city is a difficult and dangerous place, with or without a tent, with or without a Georgian terrace. This ceremony of commissioning volunteers to the city for the city is something we could learn. Let us come to the city, a place of intensified brokenness and of centralised conflict and meet it with intensified worship and centralised compassion. Come prophets priests kings, be curbside prophets, street pastors and urban servant kings. Christian hedonist, rejoice with great joy, God is for your joy, moment by moment for your joy. Battle for your joy, study for your joy, protest capitalism for the joy, I adjure you, I enjoin you, live for the joy who is there and is not silent.

Ne13 Such passages about segregation do of course have things to remind us about holiness, and purity of heart, but let us also remember how a Jesus-shaped community transforms all this. This is a shadow of holiness and a shadow of community where these things in their fullness are as Jesus, who transgresses boundaries of native and foreigner. Jesus transforms our honest work and our serious Sabbathing with his words and his way. Jn6v29 Mt11v28

200words: tacita dean

2011-10-25T13:26:00.009+01:00

“Let the dead bury their dead..” Luke 9:60

So, we're not scaremongering, this is really happening, 16mm film is no longer printed at Deluxe, and so no longer in England. This, apparently, is no mere passing of the cinema baton to younger model mediums, this is a death marked by a Unilever-sponsored season of mourning.

Only living things die.

Film lived. Any of us who have ever stood, like children, spellbound before the flickering light on a screen, delighted, know that it lived in the currency it carried: the holy moment of the creative act conveyed, unabstracted, uncoded, from the cinematographer's eye to yours. Film's creative act comes at a cost: that cost is a risk: that risk is the power of art.

Digital production is about another power. Power over time by the elimination of cost by the evaporation of space. It is not nostalgia to decry the rising tide of this infinitely expedient medium. To live digitally is to live a pixel's life, as discontinuous, reductive, isolated packets of data without meaning.

So, film went out with a fizzle. A silent dirge, a bitter 11 minutes of carefully made, forgettable imagery, raging against the digitalising of the light. I have seen too much, have you seen enough?

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/unilever2011/default.shtm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/feb/22/tacita-dean-16mm-film

(img:tate)

texting ezra

2011-10-24T23:13:00.003+01:00

Easily Ezra. Game for for texting texts? I continue to be 07729056452.

Ez1-2 Three things temples need: (1) stirring, (2) freedom, (3) supply. (1) God's work done God's way never lacks God's stir-ply: v1 'the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus..': God will make an evangelist and reformer out of a gentile if need be. v5 'every [jew] whose spirit God had stirred to go...': Christians need the will to want it (and a little self esteem) .. (2) Like leaving Pharoah, it's ever a freedom to worship. So for us. If it were for freedom that we were set free, then it is for worship that we have our freedom, and it is in music and temples and food and colour that we have our worship. How free are we? How worshiplessly fritter we our freedom away? (3) Supply. Can we be, could we be? Is mine a life that a Cyrus could give gold towards? Perhaps the Dod is.. How do we put ourselves in the way of supply? .. Be stirred and know that God is God.

Ez3-4 rebuilding the altar, rebuilding the altar first, before anything else. Worship first, sacrifice first, seek first the kingdom of God. Every day sacrifices morning and evening. Life is hard, and seeking God first is an every moment breathing living surrender. The altar ius rebuilt when afraid. & there is much to legitimately fear. We build and re-build now when we're not afraid, but when we are brave. Rebuilding. Re-building. Building something that has been before, building it again, trying to build it better, building it again because it was important & valuable but got destroyed. Building it the same but different a crying and a rejoicing. We are mixed motives, mixed feelings, we live in these tensions. Yes we do. To not feel tensions is to stop being alive, but God is the God of the living, God of the crying wailing rejoicing hurting celebrating worshippers. Go the God of lives that feel tension, God of the higgledy piggledy here and now. And bribes and discouragement and fear come against temple rebuilding, but a temple rebuilt is still a rebellion against all that rebels against God. So all this. Holy rebels let us be.

Ez5-6 Dear rebels, go, with unrelenting rejoicing, go be kind, remind, reenvision, so to rebuild. .. vs Phil's irrational fear of buereacrats: God knows the forms they have for you, and they are already signed, sealed and Eph1:13ed. .. When asked for your name 5v10, asked, 'who are you?' tell them whose you are, give an answer for the hope, tell them by whose authority you presume to be and to do and to have any claim on anything. This is how to bring the gospel into introductions and small talk. .. 6v10 Pray for king and for country and for the good of the city: there are legitimate ways to procure funding from the city in exchange for spiritual services and prayers-on-behalf-of-the-city? .. 'Huge stones .. diligently .. prospered.' Heave ho dear rebels.x

Ez7-8 the gold and silver we are given to spend wisely, towards the right sacrifices to God. This is our responsibility. Artaxerxes institutes a system that seeks to honour God because God 'blesses' v7, it is 'by grace' v28. So our responsibility and God's responsibility, and discerning what is ours and what is God's. Both are here, in these two chapters, in the repentance of our hearts and the leading of the spirit. This is hard, Gof, wat is our to do and what is yours? This discernement is a wisdom to be sought & what is wisdom? Looking at Pr3's advice for the young.. loyalty, faithfulness, trust, humility, obedience. Teach us their application today. I am struck also by a similarity in Ezra's prayers & Jesus' prayer for his disciples read yesterday. A prayer for knowing God to be God, a prayer for protection and a prayer for knowing one's belovedness. So God I pray for thee that you would know that you are v28 sacred to God. God, protect you from the eveil that will seek to destroy you. God, keep you safe to know who you are and who He is. v21 'lead us on our journey and protect us.'

Ez9-10 Today a marriage of convenient timing and a shallow exposition. Apologies if I don't do this important text justice. We can speak of marriage generally, specifically and metaphorically. We can ask of Ezra, who was wrongly marrying how and why? We can ask of our time, who should rightly marry, how and why? .. Marriage needs Law, insofar as it is the contractual propagation of a line by the intimacy of mutually motivated Others? Marriage images heaven in being a united unity in single-minded worship? Marriage is the public promise of a future fidelity by finite and broken beings, a promise predicated entirely on God's possibility, a possibility only available to those who will receive it? So, if they were not one in propagation, in praise nor in predication, they were marrying wrongly. How and why? Why would they marry like that? Ezra's not illuminating here. How and why might we marry wrongly? Generally, specifically and metaphorically. So generally, there is some mileage in extending the notion of a holy nation to the new covenant israel, in so far as there remains a biological multiplication imperative, and the need to retain the currency of a language of symbollic cleanliness, but. And we can speak specifically, less the question of whom it is impermissible to marry, but rather, why does anyone so compromise, and who can we serve those in a tangle? For surely it is a settling for less than God that is the why. And finally we can speak metaphorically, for we are married to many wives in this way. I am not tearing my clothes for my church promiscuity, I am not pulling out my beard for all the adulterous comfort capitalism's excesses afford me. Was it love or fear of the cold 10v9 that swept us into the arms of Rv17? Oh I am undone. .. 9v9 Yet our God.

200words: john soane's house

2011-10-19T00:32:00.009+01:00

“Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones..” Mark 13:1

For all that is playful there is yet a beautiful sadness in the Soane house, perfectly suited to a clear October afternoon, the whole construction, permanently on the cusp of autumn, waits for a Piranesian shaft of light to some time grace the corners of its rooms and usher in the total ruination of contemporary empires. Obsessive compulsive, this ordering of the past by an exquisite eccentric, or by a salesman dwelling amongst the tombs, or a narcissist dwelling on himself through a glass darkly, was he a happy man?

Mirrors preside throughout as passive 'recollectors' (Furján, 1997), panopticon flies on the wall, trapping one as the protagonist in his own Truman Show, and as brothel ceilings and fairground distorted mirrors, you seek yourself out for the reflected glory of a hero in this Romantic mythic structure.

If this building is the image of the form of the mind of John Soane, what a mind it must have been to be inside, what a sense of a layered and dramatic universe he must have held, what a wilful pursuing of the joy of measured light falling onto crafted form he sustained over such a period.

http://www.soane.org/
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3171253

(img:Furján)

200words: hunterian museum

2011-10-18T16:21:00.004+01:00

"...bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.." Ezekiel 37:8

A museum of a museum, a remembrance of a remembrance of things past. An aptly cold interior celebrating the birth of the clinical existence we now enjoy. And aptly bulletproof display casing for the Glass Menagerie our contemporary self-understanding clings to. We cling to this understanding: that the age of naïve surgery and capital punishment and surgical errors, is behind us: we live in the future now.

The too crisp effect, the needles of light, the clumsy perspex labelling stand cautiously at odds with that fascinated time, when everything was new, dangerous and undiscovered, when in warm wooden galleries, handmade specimens, held in handmade jars were handled by bold adventurers, daring in their enfleshed embodiment. Could they but see us now, all blanched bodies in glass postwar reconstructions.

This Pandora's cabinet of curios presents at least two difficulties, and does so frankly: the category of the 'freak' and the death of the deserving criminal. Architecturally, designers can navigate these by irony or fastidious neutrality: the grey of this exhibit is to cover our shame.

http://www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums

(img:wikipedia)

200words: oma/progress

2011-10-12T22:22:00.006+01:00

“For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost..” Luke 14:28

The cost for Koolhaas has been paid in “despair ... and vast foreboding..” (Harbison, 2009) which surface in pained essays like Junkspace. The delightful junk on show in this hyperexhibition for the tumblr generation: the material offcuts, grainy pictures, architectural detritus and self-deprecating anecdotes, are a deflection or a veiled apology for the guilt of complicity in architectural giantism: that utopian genetic disorder.

Stylistically and philosophically, OMA, as graphic designers with a penchant for cantilevers, have established a globally conversant mode of masterplanning consistent with an unstable profession in a volatile economy. In between the truss fetishising there is brave engineering, amongst their best laid plans, sketched from a thousand feet at a hundred miles an hour, there is a phenomenal creative energy, a frank and critical self-awareness.

In the exhibition, which is more a 1:1 scale model improvised in found-materials to demonstrate a possible exhibition, the strange veneration of process, and the relics of process, is total. We are invited to become the two dimensional cut-outs in another diagrammed proposal: we are exactly the statistics they love.

http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=12472

200words: the ambassadors

2011-10-11T11:57:00.003+01:00

“What then did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft clothing?” Matthew 11:8

We go out of our way to be told the messages we want to hear, in the comfort of places we want to be seen in. Catering to this felt need sustains galleries, cinemas, car-showrooms, coffee-shops, all the contemporary contexts we exhibit ourselves within and in which we are exhibited to. The Ambassadors exhibits exhibitionists just so, in a meta-commentary on the place of the arts in society.

The endurance of Holbein's piece in popular fascination is a tribute to his mastery of technique in paint and in provocation, in drawing and in drawing a crowd. The Eastpak uniformed swarms each pause, kneeling dutifully to honour the artist's perspective, each bestowing a 15 seconds of fame on this marketeer's tour de force of trompe-l'œil.

Fire Exit signage is the momento mori of contemporary life, and art is our game of distraction. Here, in The National Gallery's Room C, the painting stands boldly proud of the wall, for the fame of its being famous, for the screening of the dark emergency doors behind and for the better oblique appreciation of death.

http://www.googleartproject.com/museums/nationalgallery/the-ambassadors

melancholia

2011-10-05T23:03:00.007+01:00

Not having seen the companion pieces to this, and being unfamiliar with the various public von Trier episodes, and also my ignorance regarding manic depression renders me as but a pair of eyes before a spectacle, it was nevertheless a worthy cinema outing.

The film, in its length and tone, is indulgent, rather as Tree of Life, and the parallels I would draw between the film go further. Both legitimise their indulgence as an expression of the grief of their characters, both concern the decadent wealthy, both define themselves against hard men, both have ambitions to cast the aches of the human condition onto a cosmic canvas, both spend the length of the film waiting for death. And I enjoyed both, considerably.

Untouchable unhealth. The film, largely, leaves undiscussed melancholia as clinical condition of imbalanced biochemistry except to consider the aspect of mental health highlighted by the strained, even slapstick moments where the wedding-planner steers to avoid looking at Justine. For Justine, wishing-the-earth-would-swallow-you-up leads self-fulfillingly to a self-destructive self-exclusion. But further, and crucially, the fear, by others, of melancholia as leprosy - as contagious - constructs an apartheid. How plan we our weddings, whom do we exclude and who are our planners? Who are we that we should turn a blind eye to depression? Who are we to make untouchable those wounded victims of a vicious world?

But there is for discussion more mileage in melancholia as philosophy and as social reality. So.

You are your eschatology. This is the purpose of beginning with the end: the notion that our stories track out intractably towards our foregone fated destinations with a mechanical inevitability. But more than that, what you look for you will find: we believe in an end, and we will it into being. And this is by choice, by belief in a fatal fatalism, that we are resigned to and complicit in our future tense definitions.

Environmentalism and the end of God's world. The Earth's cruel inglorious end, fading to silence, coming to nothing: does Justine know this will happen? Then the atheists are right. Does she cause it to happen? Then the atheists are to blame? I earnestly believe that among the reasons for the failure of environmental rhetoric is the failure to convince the carbon burning public that anything other than annihilation awaits them and all of planet earth. Of environmentalism, only future hope and its present joy-of-anticipation can move us to the present sacrifice needed for future salvation. Please believe.

I have been simplistic.

There's no driver at the wheel. The elegantly absurd stretch limo sequence establishes our difficult relationship with the God who may be there but is yet silent. This incompetent God hands the reins to a sentimental groom who hands the reins to melancholia who promptly crashes spaceship earth into a rock on the side of the road.

This very night your life will be demanded from you. You aesthetes, this is the tragic demise that moping preraphaelite hipsters predicate their decadence on. This is a film for a double dip recession, whose brief reprieve is the undoing of men who have identities built on and defined by doom denial. It is John's false confidences that collapse face down in a horse's stall.

Nothing tastes. The tragedy of bigger barn builders is not simply a moral tale for the end of time, it is a tragedy in the now. Affluenza's ruinous ruin sees us, with all our trappings, in dresses like the clouds of a planet, bounding in slow motion through the garden of space where everything is heavy, all tastes like ashes, all is but an entanglement of grey yarn through which we trudge. Ours will be a slow death by slow motion, as when an LP's turntable is unplugged, we spin slowly slower to a stop, unplugged from joy we wind down to flatline.

Sex and death. As the camera here pours obsessively and too close over Dunst, the whole film is a tailback crawling past a car wreck, oh curious beings-unto-death are we. Lust lusts after that which is death in the other? Justine, a type of Salome, parallels the planet in her destructive force, and in her being the subject of voyeurism, we see the power of Melancholia to captivate through the telescope as through illicit websites. Melancholia renders Justine exhibitionist and delayed-gratification-averse. Are we, do we? Parallels abound for we are planets crashing.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1527186/

saving architecture

2011-10-04T18:45:00.014+01:00

This is a piece I wrote a draft of in the form of a letter in 2008, it is the culmination of various hopes and investigations from my time at L'Abri, and it was prompted particularly by conversations with JV, to whom the letter was written. It remains a work in progress, tidied but largely unchanged since I first put it together. In due course I will attempt an exploration of the same questions, hopefully being more historically and architecturally specific. Posting it online was prompted by two things:

http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/architecture/courses/postgraduate/ma-architectural-history.cfm
http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevindeyoung/2011/10/04/church-architecture-book/

1.0 - BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION -
After discussing with A a convoluted paper I had written in January, a tentative foray of a paper into the possibilities of critiquing sustainable architecture in world-view terms, we began one of those conversations, of the type that A clearly relishes, about the causes and antidotes to the environmental pickle we find ourselves in. To sum it up crudely, he posits the blame in a corrupted Protestantism, now indistinguishable from capitalism, and puts the responsibility for its resolution in the church’s hands also, by means of a critique from without rather than the popular but inevitably subvertable critique from within. Predictably this meant a protestant neo-monasticism. I take A with a pinch of salt, as I feel he does himself, it was the conversation I have found most fulfilling out all in my time here, it was not as perhaps it appears above, about them and us, nor did it contain a hint of the guns blazing monasticism with a capital M approach favoured by every other self-conscious emergent seeking to brand their intentional community into a publishing deal. (Too strong?) And this take on the affair lends a certain urgency and purposive direction t o a solution to our conversation-cut-short relating to how one might take the best of L’Abri home with you. If we were to make imperatives of those little pleasures that we are at liberty to take joy in here, the flower arranging, the high tea and sweat in the garden, and more than that, the placedness, the history and the pilgrimage, would we arrive at an environmental solution by accident?

Which I suppose leads me at a jump to thoughts of defining an archi-theology, how do I mean that I see everything though the lens of architecture? Certainly not in the limiting sense of everything being reducible to the built ego-theories of the last three hundred years, nor that my lens filters out all that is not a Cartesian architectural element representable in blue prints to some pleasing graphic effect.

“You talk of seeing the world as architecture. Would it make sense to you if I said I saw it through literature, as art. That is I'm exploring the relationship between literature and life and bonding them to be inseparable.”

This was how you phrased it in your letter and it has, without exaggeration, been on my mind daily since. I think if human life is story, then architecture is all at the same time the pages on which it is written, the stage upon which it plays out, and all the wardrobe, props and programmes that define and describe the action of it, of life.

So I am describing and prescribing a present and possible world and using 'architecture' as a lens and a language, claiming this method has the potential to make the world more beautiful. I stand at a difficult turn, obliged to go forward, to define, 'goodness' and 'architecture-ness', if only as working definitions, as a thing must be definable, as “more like this than this” or “not this” until eventually “this” for the blink of an eye, in the span of history, a definition stands and falls like those monastic ruins, a tribute to a former understanding.

Those who say we cannot define have surely never built anything, a brick on top of a brick absolutely is so, separating in from out. A definition may or may not last the breath out, but that is not to say that the task is fruitless or that people will not look at the carvings on a cathedral and ache for its beauty, knowing the beauty before them speaks of a time when people lived within a world sufficiently defined to build by. As your purchased Parisian letter proclaims that once there lived, moved, breathed and had their being, such p eople as took the time to celebrate the everyday. The question of 'right building' will be answered when we have established a realistic place for architecture within the attention of every soul, and this by setting out what exactly this thing, architecture, is. And so I should unpack this. I will come at this in two ways:
~2.0 – Architecture as a descriptive language for products.
~3.0 – Architecture as a prescriptive language for process.

2.0 – WHAT DOES 'ARCHITECTURE' DESCRIBE:
Architecture as a descriptive language for products: Architecture can be a language for describing things as they happen and come to be. And in this case, by extension or analogy, everything is a building: a meditated construction on a greater or lesser scale, everything is a building, every coffee table, every book, every marriage, every intentional action, every proverbial tower in life before which we should first count the cost.

2.1 - BUILDINGS AS TECHNOLOGY –
Form as inevitable given techno-economic force. Archite cture as engineering. Humans as machines. So ask: What wealth or power wrought this form?
We can view architecture as simply techno-economic phenomenon. This is an architecture of economics, it is trends and abstractions, a volumetric a rchitecture of developable areas extruded by profiteers, capped by planners, arranged by engineers, decorated by marketeers, purchased by statistics. This is a construction of reality and the reality of construction for many, but in this, popular and tragically fatalistic view we divinise the market and reduce architecture simply to impersonal grand expenditure. In this trajectory we get economistic architecture which looks, in form, increasingly like the diagrams and graphs, flowcharts and spreadsheets out of which it was birthed.

2.2 - BUILDINGS AS BURROWS –
Form as a conch shell. Architecture as biological determinism. Humans as red in tooth and claw. So ask: What wind or weather wrought this form?
We can read architecture as a personal shell or frame describing the lives and lifestyles of individuals and societies: as one might understand a cr ab by its crabshell or a tree by its timber. The home is the residue of habit, the calcifications of personal and family life, the glorious conch reflecting the health of that organism, that body that had its being singularly and particularly on that patch of earth. In this way we can view whole environments in their complexity and judge if they were conducive to life. A healthy animal leaves a beautiful shell, a healthy tree spreads its branches and all varieties of bird make their nests there, a termite colony living in harmony with its environment will construct a balanced and beautiful mound. Here we are talking of broad sustainability but in this we are essentially viewing the humans who live build and design building s as mere animals subject to the forces of nature, living by nature within a naturalistic universe.

But to move towards an architecture that more truly reflects reality we must consider the total human, who cannot be reduced to an animal or machine.

2.3 - BUILDINGS AS WORLDVIEW-FORMED AND WORLDVIEW-FORMING –
Form as poetry. Architecture as belief. Humans as believers. So ask: What will or wonder wrought this form?
In this way architecture is like any other art, you can read the philosophy of the artist and the spirit of the times in the substance, style and symbols of the work. However, architecture, for being more immediately practical offers to reveal literally the view of the world a people held and how they projected themselves onto the given natur e.

So, one has a certain fundamental understanding of reality, of life after death, value in life, confidence in the goodness of man and nature or not: a metanarrative, a myth structure, a story which makes sense of the absurdity of daily experience. Further, and born of this understanding, one then holds certain values, certain priorities towards which one applies the weight of one's energies: into a pursuit of wealth, of personal security, longevity, knowledge, justice, mercy, peace, enlightenment. And so then towards the achieving of those hopes, one lives in a certain way, orders one's relationships, orders one's lifestyle. And so th en one builds in a certain way. This is elementary, obvious even, you desire privacy you will build accordingly etc; however many of the motives are subconscious or made on your behalf by a collective consciousness, the city council, the ruling party; or the motive forces lie in ignorance. So you wish to deny God's existence you will build accordingly; a n ation wishes to clear its western consumer conscience through extravagantly displayed environmental concern, it will build accordingly; or you grew up nev er knowing the joy of placedness you will then build accordingly. So in all these ways architecture incarnates a worldview, but so much further, architecture speaks, creates the conditions for, even imposes a worldview on the people that follow. That is to say a worldview begets architecture begets worldview.

So, to live in this house with these views, on this plot, with this decoration, we are submitted to all the previous generations and all they built in their striving, all that they esteemed, protected or destroyed, then limits us, at any one time their total manpower exceeds ours. So in obvious practical ways we do not inherit a tabula rasa, but further, our imagination and subconscious are informed, coloured, limited by all the frivolous and practical concerns, superstitions, and politics of our fathers, these make up the palette of visual, practical, conceptual elements which constitute our present language, life and values. These are the sins or virtues of our fathers being visited on us unto the third and fourth generations, this accounts for the long sounding echoes of Christendom in many ways through its literal and metaphorical architecture.

It is a similar conversation to that which asks of violence in film whether it merely reflects a violent culture or if indeed it instigates violence beyond the cinema. And clearly the answer is both, but in the case of architecture, its message and coercion is inescapable, it is not merely on every street corner, it is the street corner.

Buildings moderate and govern human behaviour and relationship, effecting division or unity. They are instruments for liberation or incarceration, they are potentially fall-mitigating structures, like spiritual disciplines in bricks and mortar. Or otherwise they are a crippling weight to bear, vast and anti-human sprawls sapping freedom, dividing family, demanding burnt offerings of oil and commuter hours to sustain even a meagre existence. These anti-places, bear fruit of cynical wounded people, with impoverished imagin ations and seared consciences. We have in places built for ourselves a living hell, any number of science-fiction films, 2001, the Matrix etc, resonate with their viewers because we feel in some way that this machine we have created is killing us, drawing the life from us, as if once we knew a real world, the keys to which we have handed over.

This picture I have painted thus far of buildings might equally, if to a lesser degree, apply to all culture, all art and enterprise. I view all things in terms of their order and potential through one lens, I call this lens 'architecture', it perhaps needs to be broader, a 'meta-architecture'. But I will for now continue to call it architecture as I make my meaning understood most easily in these terms, and to zoom out would be concede a place for private architecture as a subset in this system and it would be to run away from the redefining of architecture's place that needs to be done. It is not to privilege buildings over other arts, but rather there is still a need for 'architecture' as perhaps it might once have been, as a bridging language for all crafts.

3.0 – HOW DOES 'ARCHITECTURE' DESIGN -
Architecture as a prescriptive language for process: In this way Architecture is not merely a way of seeing the world, but a way of being and a way of doing life. If we substitute 'architecture' with 'the good life'? How do we make 'architecture' happen, who is allowed to participate and where? By what process do we hope to build our future? The definition of the practice good 'architecture' hangs on the hope placed on democracy, despotism or delegation, if you will. Thus:

3.1 - 'ARCHITECTURE' AS TOTAL -
On the one hand, everyone is an architect and architecture everything, it is a second skin, an extension of the self, an expression of how we wish and will the world to be; as a word it is interchangeable with 'technology'; it is all exercises of dominion; it is a means of describing the reconfiguring of natural resource and all the ways of bending nature to serve our individual will, our need, our comfort and survival. The hope expressed in this totalising movement is valid, it is motivated by frustration at former arbitrary definitions, however, it goes awry when it makes architecture of anything and everything I decide to call 'architecture'. Leaving a thin soup for culture, an unfenced playground, no rules to play by, nothing less architectural about a toothfilling than about a towerblock. Presumably this school of thought has a name. Positively and initially, it opens up routes to a more flexible and cross-pollinating artistry, and ideally impresses on people their responsibility as part of the whole, for the whole; negatively this is incarnated as a militant relativism motivated blindly against the abuses by those formerly in a position to define architecture, wounded and angry young architects would rather have architecture be everything and nothing than concede their own mortality, specificity and limits. Any obligation to history is sacrificed on the altar of possibility, in a world without fathers or story or judgement.

3.1.1 - A PROBLEM IN THIS MAXIMALISING DEFINITION -
There is a striking parallel in this totalising re-jig of definitions towards a hope of painting a more cohesive, integrated view of the world in the debates defining 'Spirituality' in these last terms at the Manor. A damaging side-effect of the 'Comprehensive Spirituality' campaign by JP and EP is that having worked so hard to define 'spiritual' as 'that which is truly real', they confuse and disable people from discussing things which are spirit by nature, which is an impoverishment of language and muddies the water they hoped to clear. So too as I try to re-indigenise, popularise and make-human our built environment and relationship to it, if I go about it by defining all actions in space as 'architectural' then we strip language of a word to conjure the depth of that specific family of crafts related to shelter fabrication and leave a definition of limply thin vacuity.. Oh I don't know..

3.2 - 'ARCHITECTURE' AS BY AND FOR THE ELITE -
The other end of this pendulum swing places architecture in the exclusive hands of those great high priests, architects. There is a sense in which architects have seized a monopoly power to call their work 'architecture'. Marketing their skill as a mysterious, complex task quite beyond the scope of the ordinary home-dweller, and even if the plebian masses were competent to form safe and stylish abodes by themselves, it would be, they can argue, inefficient that way. 'Architecture' here quickly becomes a dark art, a philosophy, the work of a closed club of brutally initiated genius form-givers, an intellectual exercise in a coded language impenetrable to all but those well-schooled in post-modern literary criticism (and even then... to steal the metaphor, the experience of many in architecture school is of that dark room in which blind men are looking for a black cat that's not there). Architecture is dropped out of space as a joke at the expense of the pedestrian; architecture is violent spectacle assaulting the ground it stands on; architecture is illusion, the new clothes of the emperor, the art of selling facile glamour to the insecure, shallow prestige to a short term government, an air of ironic sophistication to the knowing middle classes. It could be argued this conceit emerges when architecture is argued for as a self-consciously distinct discipline, which it has a long history of doing, of elevating itself above the humble crafts of which it eventually consists, to a cerebral discipline, and this is the Greek and Romantics' heritage. In this way conventionally labelled 'architecture' is in many ways unhelpfully so delimited, as such a separation divisively severs such things which should be ordinary from the ordinary people who will daily use and inhabit this environment, it is a power game by an intellectual elite who eschew ritually unclean manual work.

3.3 - A THIRD WAY: 'ARCHITECTURE' AS AN INTEGRATED ARTISTIC LIFE? -
I am not looking for some inoffensive middle ground that satisfies both the totalisers and the cerebralists, there must be a third way. A way by which architecture is not an abstract solution imposed by an isolated genius, but neither is architecture as a word and concept stretched so thin as to denote every and any accident and void in the spatial realm. We can redeem the word, the process and the fruit of 'architecture'.

Here I am looking across displines for writing defending craft, human touch, artistic expression and poetry. Seerveld in Bearing Fresh Olive Leaves extends his proposal for the normality of the artist and their role in a community some way in this direction. If his thoughts were applied, the need for a bridging language and its fluent servant enabling the integrity and coherence of the whole would be more apparent. If we all spoke a language which had signifiers ascribing value and importance to place, story and unity within a wider total vision of the human life, we could more directly speak of our loss.

In all this I hope there is the potential for an architecture born of the seamless integration of the artist and ordinary life, for buildings as the logical and beautiful by-product of life lived relationally, for 'architecture' as the life-skill and for an infinite personal architecture, truly sacred space.

3.3.1 – URGENCY -
This misfortune, this inconvenience of less than picturesque architecture is not a grand and lofty luxury we have fallen short of. Architecture such as this, personal, allusive, human and relevant, is as necessary as poetry, and conceivably more tangibly. The absence of poetry is the lack of something life-giving and sustaining, without which we would bleed to death for lack of joy and lack of understanding, here however we are dealing with the rash sprawling of its antithesis, the weapon drawing that blood. We presently face a vacuum of language defending the value of place and beauty in our experience of space. The loss of present, relevant local art is not a victimless loss.

4.0 - THE ARCHITECTURAL PROBLEM -
Given those two previous sections discussing extensively and by analogy the 'Architecture' that could be, let us talk now about the architecture that is: Buildings and life as we know it. Let us expand where architecture is broken, and veer all over a landscape of apocalyptic language and hyperbole...

4.1 – DISCONNECTS -
So far I have tried to limit myself to definitional problems within our conception architecture, which of themselves make of architects men less than fully human, and bear the fruit of buildings, alien and aloof. So there is this, and then a breadth of wider societal problems and disconnects whose causality is to and fro with an impoverished architecture: as we view buildings today, there are notable disconnects, of architecture/art from daily life to a professional sphere of its own; the loss of responsibility for the physical environment at all by its inhabitants; a loss of story, of meaningful interaction with the narrative of built history in which our chapter falls. So, this is to say that architecture and the various individuals and forces that bring it into being are disconnected from the people it belongs to, the ground it stands on and the time it is occurs in. Christians are apt to be those most acutely complicit in these disconnects, if they hold a glibly fatalistic theology of the fall, that somehow these disconnects are to be assumed, to be expected, to be tolerated and coping mechanisms devised for surviving within them, and coping mechanisms largely drawn from the individualistic self-help philosophies that constitute the atmosphere of counsel they breathe from a secular culture.. And this rather than going for the jugular.

4.1.1 - Aloof professionalisation: This and the academicisation of architecture. This is architecture by a self-proclaimed elite, where architects, for reasons known to themselves elected to elevate their role above the sweat of brick laying, and create an intermediary role, uniquely schooled in the mysterious language of architecture. They make for themselves an insecurity in the nature of their role as divine form giver and they suffocate themselves with the bureaucracy of this tertiary craft. This pattern is set in school, the building crafts, seldom taught within the syllabus, are considered as the inconvenience to be overcome in the realisation of a paper dream.

4.1.2 - Complexity of the building industry: This has reached a point such that architects are by necessity reduced to project managers and image-mongers. No one architect can sufficiently master all the specialisations, so even prominent elements within a design, windows, landscape etc, are sub-sub-contracted. Quite aside from a resulting lack of coherence visually, artistically or otherwise, this super-specialisation makes buildings completely unrepairable, it is systemic planned obsolescence. Further, the more complex and high-tech a building is, the more anonymous manufacturing steps between the human crafting and the human inhabiting there are, the more alienated the inhabitant will feel.

4.1.3 - Consumer Culture and 4.1.4 – Placelessness: Placelessness is consumer culture applied to space, as space becomes only a consumable commodity, it loses its placeness, to coin the phrase. The culture of consumption has roots philosophically and sociologically, it was made possible in its present incarnation by the industrial revolution, its was made probable, even appealing by the corrupted work ethic and individualism of the reformation/renaissance. It has been suggested that this culture is a form of empire, its is not the only and logical outworking of technological advance, oil-driven possibilities are pursued and marketed by the vested corporate interests of a select few, advantaging them at the expense of the weak and voiceless, the poor and the environment. Consumerism, becomes an ism at the point we define ourselves first by what we have, when this shift in identity is made a house is reduced to an image of a house, and so the upwardly mobile, geographically promiscuous migrate north from postcode to postcode to postcode to postcode as each annual city bonus allows them. It is not a great leap to see how this will effect shallow places, anonymous neighbours, unrelated neighbourhoods, further nuclearisation of the home, higher walls and less patience, an faddish disposable architecture of speed, spectacle and expediency.

4.1.5 - The infatuation with and intoxication by the virtual: The unreality in which we can be sovereign: that virtual universe, that 'life' online, is a place where we can be omnipresent and omniscient, we can be the identity we wish to be with power to bring into being anything out of nothing, our finitude touches infinite possibility. These are the same hopes that drugs and religion are made of, and you can sense well the addictive power of it. The effect on architecture and place is manifold, chiefly 1. people expend their energy, time and resource within an unphysical, impermanent, essentially unreal dimension at the expense the real, this is Narcissus wasting by the pool, these are slums with satellite dishes, the blue-white cathode flicker on the living-room ceiling of every ugly house in suburbia. And 2. they are disappointed by the real and physical, just as pornography will torpedo a marriage. This is ultimately a glory exchanged for an image, this escape from the physical and contempt for manual work have philosophical roots, gnostic ideas of man as spirit etc.

4.1.6 - A denial of beauty: This is done in subtle ways, where the question is marginalised on the grounds of it being arbitrary or uneconomical, although I have had more heated confrontations in school with tutors who feel more strongly against the power structures implied in the word. There is a degree of legalism around ornament, tradition and story. It is spilt perfume all over again. And I struggle to explain except by a flight from God, beauty points to something, has its origin in something, commands gratitude to someone. Beauty in a random universe is not beauty at all.

4.1.7 - The collapse of community: And so now we study abroad, commute to work, fly on holiday; we have abandoned the church, the local grocer and the village hall; we are bowling alone, living in single-person dwellings, unmarried, divorced, and childless statistically. If we consider this only pragmatically, we are living technologically enabled but vastly inefficient lives, or to term it less economically, we are living ineffective lives. The precious 24 hours we are gifted each day are frittered away in the car, infront of the microwave, paying off our personal mortgage and trying to bring up a family on your own. To live on one's own costs more to heat, costs more to light, cost more to feed, costs more period. And you simply haven't the time to decorate, embellish and enjoy more than to throw a handful of Ikea candles about the apartment in the image of homeliness.

More serious than this, is the loss of community, in particular intergenerational community. Only if we live with children are we reminded daily and personally of who the future we are affecting is, only if we live with the elderly are we truly aware of our own frailty and mortality, in them is a wisdom which cannot be penned, in them is a life's experience communicated tacitly. If we lose this breadth of community we lose our place in the story, we need go back to the beginning and start over each generation. And this affects architecture in a number of ways: we lose a timeless way of building and replace it with spectacle, we lose the foundations for visual consensus and we lose craft and an entire consciousness which values it because we lose the embodied knowledge in which consisted. And I think we lose confidence in our place on earth, contemporary architecture swings between timid parodies of former domestic style and violently bold cries for attention.

4.2 - DISCONNECTS: FRUITS -
The measures of this lost architecture are read in the losses within ecology, as something or someone has to pick up the bill for this profligate existence. The trees felled, green fields sprawled over, oil drunk and carbon exhaled. It can be read in the loss of the human, both in the resulting extra-human scale of urban environments, super-human machine polished finishes and in the sub-human work done by an underclass reduced to a form of slavery, mindless joyless work simply to put bread on the table. And further in the loss of story, loss of ornament, increasing hardness..

I would argue that bad architecture is killing people, through unsafe space, depressing and hopeless space, divisive, exhausting and unnatural space but here, if I have not already I am sailing into spurious conjecture.

5.0 - A THEOLOGY OF THE ARCHITECTURAL PROBLEM -
In this discussion so far I have dabbled in threads and narratives, I wish to venture a meta-narrative, I believe the architectural problem is better understood and the way forward more clearly navigated in the light of the God who is there and who is not silent. Theology threatens to be but another layer of terminology and disagreement to derail us, and yet, and yet, the beauty of the person of Christ, the coherence of his alternative and the witness of history's happy houses draw me onwards.

5.0.1 - A CHRISTIAN ANSWER?: A WARNING FROM HISTORY -
I recently discovered the writing of Quinlan Terry, who has written and practised in the area of architecture and theology, he comes out in favour of a pseudo-classicism which I have not yet reconciled, but provocatively he begins what I suppose is his main treatise on the subject thus: “My subject is architecture and theology, or rather Art and Faith, the place where architecture and religion meet. The two great authorities on this subject from the last century were Pugin, who designed the Houses of Parliament, and Ruskin, the celebrated artist and writer. Both started their lives as devout Christians, and ended their days in a mental asylum...” And so timidly I tread..

5.1 - THE FALL -
So, roughly the theology is th is, a perfect world fell, along with all its subsequent architecture, but they can be redeemed. The fall, a chip in the windscreen slowly growing to completely fracture the pane, where the integrity of the pane had consisted in those crucial relationships of us to ultimate reality, us between ourselves and that between us and created order. Fallen-ness is the inherited orientation of every human being towards the self. Psychology finds a common belief by people that once we were at peace with our environment but that we have lost that connection irretrievably, the largest part of other religions address this selfishness and the guilt of it.

If broken, one should then ask how a knowledge of this helps us. A theology of the fall should allow us to say that things are not as they should be, that human nature defaults to selfishness and self-destruction and that people are not perfectible. This can be taken too far, often by evangelicals, to crushingly low expectations of human possibility, but done well it saves us from modernism's naïve hope that human nature is intrinsically good, which expressed itself in equally naïve utopian architecture for perfect people. Further, such a theology of the fall makes plain the impossibility of our saving ourselves, and relieves architects of the burden of saving humanity as they are apt to aspire to.

If people could be saved from this fallen state they ought to be observably liberated to form better architecture. But if true, I would argue this myth provides a coherent structure which connects the moral flaws with the poor architectural fruit they bear. Thus bad architecture is fearful architecture, selfish architecture, deceitful architecture. Having spent the largest part of my time at university attending a tin warehouse church, I am conscious this jump is not self-evident.

5.2 - WHAT IS THE GOSPEL? -
In the light of this fall, Christianity claims God became a man in history, died and rose again. Demonstrating life is a story not an accident, language has grounds for meaning beyond itself, beauty has a source, death is not the end. So there is nothing to fear in life, you can be confident in death, you can be confident in poverty, you can be confident in suffering and fearless in everything you do make say and build. So to the disconnects:

5.2.1 Aloof professionalisation gives way to an acknowledged creatureliness, servant architects, sacrificial and anonymous building.

5.2.2 Complexity and the machine are no longer means to salvation, human personhood has grounds in the transcendent. Technology – which is never inevitable or neutral – is put towards the end of realistically sized community. Physical work is no longer unclean, expediency gives way to patience.

5.2.3 and 5.2.4 Consumer culture no longer pretends a monopoly on joy, a market economy give way to a gift economy, identity is grounded beyond your stuff. Place is of specific value ordained by an author god.

5.2.5 The virtual loses its addictive appeal, there is a god so we don't have to be, and there is nothing to fear and nothing to escape from in the physical world.

5.2.6 Beauty, truth and goodness are grounded in a transcendental signifier.

5.2.7 The gospel and its ending of fear makes community possible, it makes a unique oneness possible. The gospel demonstrates, requires and makes possible an integrated life. The gospel is the beginning of the gift economy which begets community. Further, a common centre makes community possible. A purpose to our differences makes community possible. I believe that the gospel correctly understood, enacted through intentional community, will bring truly good and redemptive architecture.

5.3 - QUESTIONS OF A 'GOOD' ARCHITECTURE -
Means of judging the goodness of architecture:
- Is it good work? - was the piece and its constituent parts brought into being by individuals working in such a way that they would do it regardless, if they were unpaid? ~ as in CSL's 'Good Work'
- Is it alive? - does it operate to contribute and cooperate within its local ecosystem? Does its bring dignity to the humans building and inhabiting? Does it sustain a certain relational ecology – this rather than cancerously massive cells within an organism society. Who is glorified?
- What does it say? - does it speak a message of hope or cynicism, is it afraid, fearful architecture or is it joyful? Does it take a Sabbath, is there leisure painted on it, is it one seventh frivolous? What is its attitude to the ordinary? How does it relate to its elders?

5.4 - TOWARDS A 'GOOD' ARCHITECTURE: HOW SHOULD WE THEN BUILD? -
What is argued for here is a paradigm shift, not merely at the level of the beliefs of those at the top who presently effect architecture, but a shift is the nature of the 'top' all together, like a mustard seed or a virus, a grass-roots movement (there is a tired phrase) from the ground up (and the clichés sparkle on the water) compelling other people by the joy of such a community, by the very presence of God among them demonstrated by their unity, to leave their consuming addictions (and puns as well, this letter must nearly be over).

The social critique must go deep enough, deeper than Ruskin's, deeper than Quinlan Terry's. There must be urgency, abandon and action not talk. There must be a clarity in our understanding of our physicality and of heaven and of 'need'. There needs to be a reassessment of place through family. There must be a commitment to the long haul in a specific place. We must effect an integrated life, food, building, education, and this by the spiritual disciplines. We will live by Unity Humility and Prayer.

6.0 - END -
I'm just throwing bullet points around now. If you are still reading and have anecdotes, refutations, illustrations, to put flesh on these bones, fire away.. I have tried to present the lens I see through, the problems of art in the world that motivate me towards a new way of seeing, and a new language for discussing goodness and necessity in buildings and life, I have called it 'architecture', as it were a qualitative term, one equally might use 'poetry' to name this language and form.

So concluding, in this letter and at lunch tables we are writing about writing, talking about talking, speculatively communing in discussion of communal possibilities as if the talk were an end in and of itself. It is as if this whole period at L'Abri as been an introduction, the preface to biography, the hypothesis of an experiment. And there is a certain irony in arguing on paper against paper architecture, in criticising criticism culture, and in asking using the medium of theory to propose a move away from theory. Irony, nay arrogance; here like every other brave opponent to modernity, I will be subverted by its empire unless I go beyond its city gates, this should read untriumphant as a suicide note, here in concluding should be offered the quickest directions to the known horizon of present possibility, that is the only humility.

texting two chronicles

2011-10-01T13:42:00.008+01:00

Come chroniclers, come chronicle chronicles with we. This is what unlimited texts was made for - 07729056452 xx

2Chr1-2 Peacetime is a gift. Skills are a gift. Collaborators are a gift. Wisdom is a gift. Wisdom. How is wisdom measured and scaled. Wise, wiser, wisest, what knowledge is sufficient to govern by.. Is wisdom's y-axis merely a capacity to project a greater number of chess moves? As applied to the desire that our rulers be environmentally wiser/wise futurecasters? Or, if the fear of the Lord is the beginning, then is seeking to open ourselves to a greater fearing the true necessary sufficient condition for a wise-wrought ecological future? .. Huram-abi. What is intended by introducing him as the son of a daughter of a daughter? In an age where men apprenticed men? So speculate the mother's role in nurturing a culture's culture-makers.

2Chr3-4 Temple building again. Winged creatures, pomegranates, bulls & interwoven chains...liberation, joy, strength, community? I don't know. How much symbolic nuance in design is lost across time & culture? .. Are there any universal symbols? All art is of a time and a place... So how do we create spaces designed to usher in worship that are inclusive? Is this the wrong question to ask? ..There's always a joy in discovering new symbolic meanings to things. Pomegranates anyone?

2Chr5-6 Steadfastness. 5v13 6v42 Steadfastness is measured by unbroken promises over unbroken time. Knowing that steadfastness, trusting it now, risking on it forever is available by an immersion in a comprehensive history of God's dealing's with God's people where we find a long-suffering, long awaiting, long longing Lord who actively pursues us in love. So textably onwards OT.. 5v13 What of the cloudiness of a cloud prompts our meteorological God to manifest himself as such? Condensation an image of incarnation, the translucence of evaporated living water, the all-present God made visible in a winter day's breath. .. 6v22 – Praying the promises of God. If when famine, if when sin, if when defeat. This is how we define the relationship. We trust in anticipation. .. 5v18 Active verbs for inanimate sculptures is all a bit Indian in the Cupboard's Night at the Museum.

2Chr7-8 Fall facedown and other Redman lyrics, wanting here to follow his call to 'let us recognise what a sacred thing we do.' Remember remember the glory of God in the grind, the presence of a God good glorious & loving, dazzlingly present, present as we pray. Give me eyes to see, and give me faith to keep praying, for God here answers Solomon's prayer in kind, kindly. 8v11 not straightforward sexism but this wife of 1Ki11v1 an idolator.. This a picture of sin's segregating compartmentalising, things we don't bring to the temple. A holy life is an integrated life where all of us is brought into the holy place. God is not satisfied with less than all of us, even in times of Solomon's intimacy with God here.

2Chr9-10 v4 Is this sort of wisdom will available? Wisdom to leave you breathless? Or have we, as moderns, devised a worldview which pre-empts surprise and precludes wonder? 10V8 So we esteem youth still now and more, so we stratify demographically to the exclusion of wisdom. And turn we to reactive definitions of right yoking. 10v4 Had he? If Solomon heavily had, what force or cake or circus kept the peace in his time? Temples are built on the shoulders of a people dignified by compassionate words and good management? Given the chance, we, young restless Hebrews, choose weak future leaders who sell the farm. We resist yoking not so much for its weight, but for being ill reined by an ill reigner. Today, let's do hard things, dream big things, and collaborate well.

2Chr 11-12 The GNB says that Rehoboam desired was in order to 'restore his control' over the northern tribes. We know there's connection between attempts to control and rebellion against the true God... how do I try to control the universe, with subtlety and self-deception? Illusions of control come in different ways, whether warring, or as later in fortifying 'my' cities ('kept under his control') in trying to hoard or preserve what I think is mine. Attributing ultimate control or ownership to ourselves is always an illusion, for there are greater forces than me in this world: Shishaks may come to take everything away from you, & everything will still be God's. God comes with mercy justice mercy justice, and our response must be humility, turning control into ordering and ownership into stewardship. We know this in the abstract, but let us examine our hearts and our ways.

2Chr13-14 Onward Christian soldiers, boldly, but with appropriate boldness, appropriate to the God we worship, appropriate to his kingdom economy, an upsidedown economy. So, don't be living water resistant, rather be weak to be strong, for the prayerful weak powerfully win. When you trust not in your idols you are strong.

2Chr15-16 God is with you if you are with him. How do we know that God is with us? In our seeking he will be found. Our assurance then is not in our conviction that we have yet reached answers, but in our conviction that God has answers and our earnest seeking of him. God is with us in the seeking, God in the looking. This is a word in time. v7 be strong, be not discouraged. Be Not Discouraged. The work you do will be rewarded: let us trust God for this, and leave it to him. Loud oaths to the Lord, today would I declare publicly and plainly that I seek a God who is real. Re-covenant this morning, find the Methodist covenant prayer & make it in your heart. So doing relinquish your idols again, take delight in worshipping God even in a difficult place, and know His peace at every side. Ah. & let us keep on with it, unlike Asa who got it right to then get in wrong ... the Lord keeps watch over the whole world. He knows us. So let us persevere in our covenant, even today.

2Chr17-18 Here we are presented with a nation secure, secured by God for their faithfulness, for their faithfulness. It is a military and economic security. What would that look like here and now? And, at what point does Jehoshophat's militarisation go astray? .. If we are, in so far as we are, for the sake of argument, the faithful southern kingdom, what are the limits of alliance? What is the measure of a faithful collaboration, contrasted with mere politically expedient peace, a compromised household, hedged bets and vague boundaries? .. 18v14 And the use of irony, here uttered in contempt of his listeners. When we finish fasting irony, let us consider how to feast irony. I am speaking as a fool.

2Chr19-20 God knows our mixed motives, he sees our good and our bad, our secret wrongs and our unknown courageousnesses. Let us, acknowledging this, be drawn out of ourselves towards holiness, like Jehoshaphat. Jeho stands within Solomon's 2Chr6 prayer for the temple, holding onto his heritage and tradition and the faith of those beyond and before him. .. The battle belongs to God and not you: do we really know this humility? What does it mean to march out with singing, approaching new work and new study with such a different approach, method and motivation from those proscribed expectations? v37 Shipwrecks, seriously. The fruit of unholy alliances. So seek first the kingdom of God, for we are not to be so.

1Chr21-22 Is there nothing good here? Just bad kings doing bad things? 21v7 is the lamp of grace, presumed upon in every other verse while sin abounds. We don't have to join that deathly carnival we see around us, we don't have to perpetuate the mess we inherit, because of that promised lamp. That lamp enjoyed by being a torch passed on: how can we be Jehoshaphats' shelter from the storm to that which Joash's God has put in our life?

2Chr23-24 Brought out of dark places to be given a crown and a text, an identity and a way to live, a value and values. Why do so many of these kings forget who they are, forget who God is, after periods of faithfulness? Resoluteness is hard, steadfastness is hard, for circumstances will change. I want to end well, so let us practice these disciplines.

2Chr25-26 Oh Azariah, you and whose army? .. 25v14 Reminds me of JJohn's anecdote about a good-luck rabbit's-foot, “the rabbit wasn't lucky..” The psychology of superstition is bizarre, but such is all works-righteousness: we imitate strivers and their striving, we join those bandwagons, because, you know, at least it's something.. This in environmental thoughts left over from Melancholia: the strange comfort we find in indulging and endorsing the defeated and deafeatist philosophies of a dying world. Come now, go, act, be strong for battle, for God has power to help. There is a God. He does have power. He is willing your help, if only we will.

2Chr27-28 As we continue to contrast getting it right & getting it wrong, picturing Jotham in happy settlements in the woods. Ahaz's unfaithfulness strikes me as such hard work, all that energy burning sacrifices to Gods we know will not save us. God have mercy on my misplaced energy. And mercy justice, this is why – we live in a flood of mercy, our 'guilt is already great' but God makes a way so we can make a mercy way for others. The forgiven take no prisoners of their own, they have balm and donkeys to give.

2Chr29-30 After the best 41 sleep ever.. v20's 'rose early' appears at critical junctions throughout the bible, and it is its own reward, for any of us who grabbed 6am front row seats for last week's Indian summer sunrises. As bright-eyed spiritual toddlers let us seek He. .. The discipline of celebration is alright aye. Working backwards, let us reverse engineer our lives accordingly. As last night, when heat was displayed, we took naan bread, broke it and gave it to..Let's talk about the problem with communion wafer-thin wafers.. Having established a Godly feasting paradigm, let us develop contexts for consensus 20v23, still working backwards, then let us be about spiritual spring cleaning, which comes from recognising failures in the areas of Lamps and Doors. What lamps are out, what doors are off in our lives, what areas of darkness, what wrong openesses. So Lamp/Door Convictions -> Sacrificial Spring Cleanings -> Convivial Consensus -> Right Feasting. Let's let's.

2Chr31-32 Confusedly, on money, giving, receiving, blessing, storing-up. Asking from an unabstracted place at present what it means to trust God for provision without sliding into a destructive prosperity theology. To be taken from this .. give first to God, focus your primary energy on your giving-away. Teach me wisdom in this walk, God. Building storehouses here given a seal of approval. If we are not to simply build bigger and bigger barns for no end, what do Godly storehouses look like? Godly saving? Made holy by a vision and intention for wealth's distribution? The ways of the world will come with doubts and discouragement, but have confidence. Surely this God of yours can save you.

2Chr33-34 Manasseh for us: humble yourself for a happily ever after. Amon: or not. Josiah: the youth of kings and catwalk models, elected by discontented and revolutionary generations for their image of a new hope? And impressionability? .. Now, happy 34v12-13 Robin Evan's “Problem with Numbers” essay surveys some of the oft-made analogies of music and architecture: parallels in rhythm, abstraction, proportion and paper notation. It is a comparison of practice and performance which is missing. But imagine this scene, bow-ties on building sites, whistling work, polyphonic screeding, harmonic housing, oh hear the strings rising.

2Chr35-36 A tradition of laments v25 for a fallen Jerusalem, fallen protagonists, fallings away. We are part of this story, where at times everything of value seems burned to the ground. But this is the story, from Ecc3v4-5 to Matt5v4 to Rev21v4, we are in the middle of this story, in our stories, towards a rebuilt temple, a resurrection Sunday and a new Jerusalem. Yes.

texting one chronicles

2011-09-14T22:10:00.009+01:00

Come chroniclers, come chronicle chronicles with we. This is what unlimited texts was made for - 07729056452 xx

1Ch1-2 Wondering about those listed here whose stories we don't know, the 12 tribes of Ishmael and all the other branches of the tree..do you ever think about how everyone was a baby once? How were these unknown parents and their children? Would we engage people differently if we held their family histories at the front rather than the back of our minds? Maybe I should tell my story more and better.

1Ch3-4 Just to recap for those at the back, we are to go forth, we are to multiply. Begotten begetters are we, lest we forget to beget, lets be getting begetting. Because this chronology is the stream of the good life, and because Christians are (re)born not made, and because one cannot give what one does not have, the onus is on us, who have, to spend ourselves praying life, speaking life, leaving a legacy. This against every modern hero myth of the self-made orphan superman, this against the hope that London's children might be saved by education, this against the popularly legitimised ingratitude of adolescent angst. Oh the debt I owe to God who sovereignly wrote me in. Oh the debt I owe to all who collaborated with him for the sake of my faith.

1Ch5-6 Reuben and folly and shame and its ripples through generations, revisiting the question of whether we live as though our children were watching. Lines of Levites - how do we apply cultural difference and how do we apply theological difference to understanding handed-down vocations? What does it mean to be a missionary kid, or a child of the manse, other than as labels to hide behind sometimes? 5v20 to go to sleep in & wake up in:trust, prayer, answer, victory. Trust. Prayer. Answer. Victory.

1Ch7-8 Namers naming namers naming. Other things than biology going on in these cascading chains of inheritance. 'Philip Arthur' a mere signifier, a steering influence, a prophetic calling? Picturing that each of these Israelites was a baby butternut once, a helpless miniature, and their name was the first man-made mark made upon the blank canvas of their being. I am a Jackson of a Jackson, inheritor to all that was Jackson before me, but I am also a Philip son of a Nick, torchbearer of all the love, hope and prophecy that 'Philip' had invested in its meaning from my namers. .. Renaming, adoption, lineage. Peters and Pauls, as the reborn Simons and Sauls, are reborn into and unto a new set of hopes, associations and promises. Just as we are dual citizens of Britain and of heaven, so too are we of dual genealogies. Let us seek a redemptive renaming for those who have been hurt by a mislabelling world.

1Ch9-10 Returned from captivity, how do we then live? Pausing to thank God in a weekend's grateful overflow, thank you God that you bring us out of captive places, thank you that you are more than enough. What does Jerusalem look like once we've been through captive Babylon & out the other side? How is Jerusalem different to Babylon, what are its buildings & systems & structures like? We, who are the returned captives, Jerusalem-dwellers, how do we shape this city? Guarding our gates against what? Injustice, unmercy.. Checking supplies for a worshipful way. Making cakes. Making music. Sliding from lists to narrative between 9 and 10 a reminder of the messy way, captured by storytelling than facts and figures, that our lives play out & God among us in them.

1Ch11-12 David brought unity and prosperity and v40 joy. Importantly, if we are to seek the same, he had 'Help' v 1 17 18 19 21 22. What is help? An asymmetric collaboration, a gift transaction, a service rendered to a weaker/lacking party, an act mutually beneficial only in so far as it is more blessed to give? And David's helpers are numerous v22, expert v8 and come with full intent and single mind v38. Does this advance our understanding of Adam's helper? Does this advance our understanding of the Holy Spirit? Our understanding of help relies on a vision of a hopeful, helpfilled, peacepeacepeacefilled future v18, towards which we help one another, and it relies on a knowledge that God is the source of all help, a grace for which we are but conduits.

1Ch13-14 An invitation to join together in the promised land. The ark of God at the centre for surely he is worthy and made it happen. Poor uzzah! Just helping God not to fall off while in transit. God needs no help, is holy and wholly dangerous. Death comes to those who enter his presence with sin. In Jesus our sin is covered but death must still come now and later to all that cannot exist in the hold of holies. Sovereign is God. Incredible blessing for those he dwell with like Obed-Edom. Victory in his time and way. And so today, mindful of Uzzah's sin now covered by grace we are temples for God's glory in seeking his will not our own and whether we are to go out to battle or circle around revealing the might of our God that all may know.

1Chr15-16 In praise of thankfulness. The secret of a happy life is a thankful life: the crucial calibration of our satisfaction by celebration first. The secret of a thankful life is a life meditated on God's Godness: his v9 creating works and all that even a deist might know him by, his v22 saving works and all that is present tense continuously interactive, his v34 faithful character and the privilege of Knowing that he is this and not that. Now praise him because he can be known. Now praise him because knowing him is joy. Now praise him because that joy is always strengthening. And in that strength's overflow, Praise Him: dress Up 15v27, speak Up 15v16, eat Up 16v3. From your 16v8a Up go v8b In and from your In go v8c Out. This is the three cylinder motor of the good life. Ec-static with joy today friends.

1 Chr17-18 The front to back reading with stories re-told makes this like a flashback scene in a film, the promise to David remembered in the knowledge of the reality that the promise has prevailed, has survived human faithlessness throughout generations. & so again the value of promises remembered. What does God promise? Here v7 direction v8 intimacy, fame, v9-10 settledness, liberation, victory, v11 legacy, v12 future hope, v13 faithfulness. Not sure what to think about fame, does God promise fame and what kind? Better words: witness, influence (?) David's is v16 humility & v25 courage. So today, humility & courage, because there is a God.

1Chr 19-20 A Bathshebaless chronicle, here the more hagiographic with distance? These rerecountings serve in some small way as stereo-speakers, 3d goggles, locating by differential reading a sort of triangulated nuance? Or at least they double underline themes, messianic kingship themes, which had seemed important during the evolution of God's people in the time between the writing of the two accounts. How do we understand ourselves in the (Parisian Midnight) light of our heroes? There is a time for celebrating, say Muller's, fruit; there's also a time for remembering his flaws. .. 19v13 Be strong. Be strong generally, be strong in your collaborations, be strong for the sake of God's people, be strong for the sake of God's city, London. .. The Ammonite king wore a 34kg crown. Be strong for that inheritance.

1Chr21-22 Thinking this morn on how we are apt to try to pin down or contain the infinite God in a finite text, & then this on the sin of enumerating. To try to quantify can be a great idolatry, an attempt at control, a refusal to let God be God, in all God's infinite unquantifiable glory. Let us be swept away, let us open up our hands, rather than trying to count. 22 there is a new story here in David's charge to Solomon to build the temple, told here that David shared Nathan's word with Solomon & provided resources. Eph3v10 God has provided in advance good works for us to do, we stand in need of this reminder on entering new seasons. Resources, people & vision have been prepared in advance. v19 a call to worship, felt a call to remember my Rev2v4 first love, drawn back to the temple this morn.

1Chr23-24 David organised. Structures serve to get the best out of Prophets, Priests and Kings. Structures are an investment by us towards a good Godly inheritance for our temple-building offspring. Ruskin: “When we build, let us think that we build forever.” (if I may blur my building/being metaphors without the obvious idolatry of the now) 23v13 Forever, we are to bless God's name forever, and always. 24v7 If we are called to be 24/7 watchmen in the house of the Lord, if into perpetuity we are perpetually to be ready to give a blessing, always ready to give an answer, always rejoicing, with the poor we will always have, then, at each scale of our existence, let us gather, let us draw lots, let us be ambitious on a temple scale, towards an individualist's impossibility.

1Chr25-26 Struck by the references to both expertise & ability (25v7, 26v7, 8, 14, 32) & the blind drawing of lots. There is a time for everything, a time to let the experts loose to do excellently that which they are God-gifted at, & a time to indiscriminately place ourselves alongside each other to offer & be offered the same. When is which? An important question – when we get it wrong there can be pain & frustration in both directions. Wisdom is a day-to-day discernment, in our music, watchfulness &administration. Also enjoying the image of Herman's von Trapps.

2Chr27-28 v24 We've visited before this wrath for counting, a little baffling given these history/pentat books' preoccupation with Numbers. Perhaps a caution against scale? Against the necessary will-to-power of macro-accountancy. Life and population policy decisions increase in presumption exponentially for the wider area they presume over? 27v3 shedding blood and house building's disqualification. Can we explain 20th century architecture by this maxim? The 20th being the unprecedented century of war? v19 Lit. hand-writ thinks the ESVSB. What script picture we of this note and other trains of imaginings.. And finally v20-21 be thus commissioned this Wednesday. And publicly. Be thus undismayed. For the Lord God even my God is with thee.

1Chr29 I am young & lack experience, & the work to be done is tremendous, but the provision is there, let us hope. Let us join in with David, God you are to be praised forever, you are great and powerful, glorious, splendid & majestic. Everything comes from God. Everything. God the cause, source, author & giver. All money spent should be a gift back to God, so all money, time, talents & resources spent should glorify God, a weighty challenge. Then a Heideggerian David, we pass through life like strangers & exiles, life is strange & mysterious, painful & confusing & alienating. Foreigners in a familiar place, so often. Yet here is this God to worship, this mystery all powerful glorious & majestic. And so. From your place of confusion seek generosity, integrity, honesty, sincerity, a wholehearted desire to obey God. God, God, please be found.

charli & jon

2011-09-12T23:53:00.003+01:00

mike & abi

2011-09-12T23:36:00.003+01:00

nic & hamish

2011-09-12T23:24:00.004+01:00

john & katie

2011-09-12T23:18:00.004+01:00

james & alyssa

2011-09-07T22:56:00.004+01:00

texting two kings

2011-09-01T14:06:00.004+01:00

Two Kings a texting. Come play - 07729056452.

2Ki1 (/) Oh the faithlessness of this one defenestrated: we need not be. Of swearing at speed bumps and such, apt are we to self-justify self-pity, in the face of misfortune we deceive ourselves, believing God owes us, believing that victims of fate, of singleness, of genetic predisposition, of exhaustion, are exempt from idolatry prohibitions. Lovers we are free indeed to face all of life.

2Ki2-3 Elisha & Avoidance. Why? Some things are too painful, sometimes words are not enough. I need wisdom in when to speak & when not. 3v7 a sort of inversion of Ruth1's “you...I” with an “I...you”, ways we hide our will to power maybe. These superstitious kings; I feel now, bodily, the tension of hope for things & the god who is not this slot machine, God is not subject to my demands. But god heals infertile waters & fills valleys with water. This is an easy thing in the eyes of the Lord. Easy. Oh.

2Ki4-5 Is all well? There are no minor miracles and there are no occasions which cannot be reordered so to make explicit God's character. We are those artists charged to live with Elijian allusivity to demonstrate to a watching world the God who makes all things amazing. .. There is a connection between a culture of debt and the constraints on having/retaining children. God comes to break that, God comes to be known by breaking that. .. As Naaman. Be baptised. Be not proud. Be baptised as this is no mere ritual, v13 this is to do with Being. v14 So we must come as a child, so supernaturally to then be like a child, reborn. v17 Soil's significance relates us back to 1Ki8 and the value of place: revelation is still now limited, nodal and specific. v26 I have accepted money and garments in exchange for the employment of my God-given gifts. Oh hired hands, how can we but be?

2Ki6-7 God is all about us. Open my eyes, open our eyes. God is for us & not far from us. There is a cosmic battle, and God is all about us in strength. Praying in hope, in the tension of a world where some are fed by ravens and some eat their own children. A call to pray, a call to serve. & 7v9 a call to share good news. It cannot be kept to ourselves.

2Ki8-9 Frequently baffling. .. Why, of what cause, to what end, does the king restore the Shunammite woman's land? Except to image the Grace that promises any who have left houses brothers and all of Mk10v29? At a stretch, she is a woman previously of means who left it all in faithful obedience, but. Better that she were one without 4v8's history, that this might be a simpler mercy-justice less obscured by notions of reward. Anyways. We are London, many a sojourner's Philistia, many a sojourner's return. So grace them. .. 8v12 Arbitrary pronouns (Elisha is him and/or he) draw attention to the Look which elicits a pained shame felt here for all human brokeness? .. Ch9's stealth truthers, ninja annointers, are hard to apply, outside afghanistan. Perhaps there is a time and a place for such covert evangelism, eschat burglars speaking the truth in gloves. Breaking in to break through to difficult people.

2Ki10-11 Elijah and Jehu both bring to an end Baal worship, but differently. How do we compare them, what can we learn? I'm not sure of the answer, to think on. With Athaliah the promises of God to the line of David seem dead, dissolved, disappointed. A seeming betrayal of promise a time we are apt to doubt God's power, reality or care. But divine plans, seeds, hibinating child-kings we be led out, to new proclaimings, annointings, shouts of life. Let us take heart that God is steadfast & surprising, let us not give up when the solution cannot be seen by our eyes.

2Ki12-13 Lukewarmth is twice indicted, convictingly. First, the priests. We lose architectural embellishment to embezzlement: the life less decorated is a loss lost to squandering middlemen. We are middlemen. We are stewards and architecture-which-delights is but the canary in the stewardship coal mine. Unanswered, “Why are you not repairing the house?” Oh let us not eat because this is not working. Second, Joash. Shoot for the stars, with both barrels, on all cylinders. Let us with enthusiastic obedience and obedient enthusiasm go and Ecc9v10 and Col 3v23 and. God desires that we 'make an end of it', seeing things through, finishing well. Our life of limited ambition: we do not have because we do not ask. (Third) imagine a world without accountants. Such a world is possible 12v15.

2Ki14-15 These histories remind of our throwness, that we all have our genealogies, and we may do as our parents have done. But we are not judged for our parents' choices, we are judged for our own. And this is somehow how it is, our freedom withint throwness, God knows what we are rightly accountable for and what we are not. So choose well. This is not an atheist's existentialism but an acknowledgement of the God of the possible, the God of collaborative redemption.

2Ki16-17 How do you measure an idol? How should I measure my idols? Working backwards from these archetypally extreme examples in search of their constituent parts: 1. 16v3 Child sacrifice. My idolatry shows in my taking power over the powerless, denying the gift of gift, making expendable the sacred, searing my conscience in displays of misallegiance. 2. 16v10 Building altars. Symptomed here in the monkey-see-monkey-do mimicry of modelling duplicate altars, a formalist trusting in the magic of space/shape to save us, uncreative and destructive refashionings of the previously sufficient, previously sacred. 3. 17v7 Exile. While we are not culpably killed for our parents' sin, we do exist in a sea of systemic sin visited on from preceding generations. If the church is estranged, if we build houses only to not live in them, if we plant trees only to not eat their fruit, then ours is an exile? Of idolatry?

2Ki18-19 Destroying the bronze snake, a symbollic way of distancing from old faith, now deepened? Is there a healthy way of getting rid of habits of old faith? As I sort through old bits of paper, it all to be remembered or should some prayers be forgotten? Freedom & determinism again, ridding oneself of things from the past a way of declaring that our past is not our sole determiner? .. Do you think your words can replace military force? Maybe they always could. Hezekiah manifestly behaves differently because there is a God. Faithfully turning to prayer amidst discouragers discouragement. A confidence in God unlike Senna's confidence in himself. Take Hezekiah's story of faith this morning, it is for today. Come to the God who is real with your petitions.

2Ki20-21 Hezekiah, in search of lost time seeks a sign's sign, a miracle's premiracle. Why? Bear with me. BBC's Page Eight illustrated a sort of freedom which comes from 'living in injury time', but. We can out-do even this moribund heroism.. Promised a bulletproof 15 years, how would you then live? 1Cor15v55 with a Groundhog Day's generous zest for life? As HudsonT, premiracles enable us to live miracle-predicated dangerous lives, to risk marriage, to cross oceans, to lead others on faith-basedly financed mission. Alaz Hez wastes his borrowed time building bigger barns and Israel promptly returns to infanticide upon his demise, so my being-unto excursion lacks a tidy conclusion. Perhaps reading this sign episode as a flashback pre-Senna we can claim he did some miraculous good from this premiracle.. Oh lovers, know beyond knowing that you are loved, and so risk.

2Ki22-23 Knowledge makes us more accountable. God speaks when you read. With great education, insight, prophecy, comes great responsibility. God, seeking your revelation, know that it will have to change how we exist. Josiah the little-known hero of faith. It is altars & not just idols that are in need of tearing down. What are my pagan altars? All that facilitates iol worship..habits, places, material things, ways of engaging people, other. Let us covenant with God together, let us passover celebrate.

2Ki24-25 Idolatry leads to ruin. What is idolatry? The lie that you can have God-and. Polygamy's cake had and eaten. Schaeffer's synthesis. If you are fickle with God you will be fickle in all of life, short-termist, spread thin, fleetingly fashionable, second-handing, people-pleasing, double-minded, hollowed-out, in idolatry we are our own undoing. In believing we can serve God and serve idols we do not serve God. We become false 17v15. Note how Judah sides with Babylon, then Egypt, then Babylon. Either and any. God desires our unfickle affection, and desires that we image infickelity in all of life. .. If our living hope within is ailing, it is perhaps advised to clear out our incense bowls and sacred crockery which disguise our sickness. And in this sense there is hope in the purge wrought by Babylon. God is working for God's glory, God is working out a saving in all we see. So hope we.

texting one kings

2011-08-20T13:52:00.009+01:00

Hello. One Kings crossing London daily betwixt texters so inclined. Come play - 07729056452.

1Ki1-2 Old elders and the interregnum quandry of who and how. David, as senility saps his virility, knows not and knows not what, and so our baffled king gives way to the hallelujah chorus.

1Ki3 Another much recounted tale that we would seek to make enfleshed today. God is so big and powerful, asking him to make me wiser, make me better, it is a terrifying prayer to pray. Make us better, remake us. Solomon's wisdom here demonstrated to be married to compassion. Seek wisdom for compassion today, for that which will confront you, for surely it will.

1Ki4-5 Wisdom is. Wisdom is from God 5v12. Wisdom is for worship 5v7. Wisdom is in the trees 4v33. Wisdom sings 4v32. Wisdom is breadth, wisdom is depth 4v29. Wisdom cooks on a rota, but more than that, wisdom begets structures, timetables and delegation with the purpose of the dissemination of wisdom: wisdom works out wise ways of making wisdom widespread. And then cathedrals. 4v20 By social justice cathedrals are built. And of wisdom-wrought peacetime. Why war we, this nation at war knows not, as David knew not.

1Ki6-7 So architecture yeah, full of the redundant detail and careful making you hope that we would better notice, enjoy, experience as worship. Tell me, how does this compare with what you hope for, with Huram the bronzesmith known by Solomon & invited to play. What can we learn? Building, dwelling..the dwelling of God. God in buildings. Most Holy Places. If Christ tears down the curtain, prayer is ceaseless &everything is spiritual, are there no more most holy places? A well trod question, the answer is probably yes and no? But what does that mean for buildings, & what for the way we spend today's time?

1Ki6-7 Oh happy the architecture of happiness. Holy Places Are. And today they are not less nodal, the happening of holiness is not less placed, but it is as if the one greenhouse, that jewish prototyping workshop, has been flung open, and spores as mustard seedlings there germinated as little mysteries for long ages are now blown on the Spirit's wind to entemple the cracks of the world, to renature the voids. Berry speaks of 'no unholy places, but sacred places and desecrated places.” thither go we to entemple.

1Ki8-9 Let us benedict out houses thus, that God's eyes would see us in 24/7 prayer, v29. .. Praying towards a place, can we consider this unsuperstitiously? Perhaps contrasting it with 9v8. We live publicly; our temples and our homes and our bodies are the storefronts to the goodlife, windows to the soul. So comport oneself with a conspicuous orientation that acknowledges what God has consecrated and where. That our entempled landscape might not become enruined by our incorrigible forgetfulness.

1Ki10-11 Knowledge for knowledge's sake is never enough aye, even it if is a good. Wisdom without faithfulness is dead. What are my hundred idol-worshipping wives in my life? What increases to steal me from God without my noticing? What & who's influence?

1Ki12 My little finger. A timely moment of happy house escapism last night saw Casino Royale. A worthless film. But one which quips this exact euphemistic boasting. What are we to make of this Kinsey fashioned Carry On Kinging sort of school boyish laddery? While easily we could leap from the heavy yolks here to our new King whose yolk is easy, perhaps we would miss an intermediary. We do not merely exchange yolks but paradigms. The paradigm here represented in the dick+whip combination is a carrot+stick model of leadership built on marketing+legislation: promising all the sexual potency of bus ads and commanding the injurious retribution of mortgage holders' commuter hours. This blind boasting+striving begets the crescendo of sex+violence which issues the collapse of such an empire on those built. So. Jesus' servant leadership is not merely lighterly burdened, but rather is another game altogether. So we, Rm3v27, 2Cor 11v30.

1Ki13 Truth and lies innit. Lying in the name of God, lying for the sake of a perceived good, lying in order to offer hospitality. Lying is always the manifestation of an attitude that we know better than God. There are truths & there are falsehoods, & Good is God, God knows the secret things, God will expose lies with true truth. In an aching for truth is a gladness that I will be judged.. Truth will win so tell the truth. Truth & conviction: do not be led from God's voice by others, not even by your elders, not even by prophets. & of letting anyone be priests as the 'fatal sin' in my version – this is not the priesthood of all believers but a disbelief disvalue of truth.

1Ki14-15 A study in the theme of the masquerading, charading, pantomiming, pretend-to-be-my-sistering all through the OT would not be unprofitable. And we find ourselves in this: all the ways we seize our facticities with both hands, taking power to manufacture identity, to closet our shame. This because we fear 'unbearable news', this because we know how far we have lied and accordingly how very overdue we are to meet a lion in the road. We hide from an angry God who isn't, we sin striving to fight a fight that has already been won and to become a beloved which we already are. Let's not... So, in this line of bad kings, Asa is notable for his prudent dependence and seeking of peace through a gift economy. Let's.

1Ki16-17 The return to an endless cycle of kingly rebellion is somehow more painful after David's story. The front to back reading that gives more context to David makes clearer why he is so held up as aman after God's heart. To be so tangibly distinctive & Godly...we should seek psalmic honest intimacy with a God who would make us such. Elijah comes into thoughts about trusting God for money, trusting God for all provision & then to raise the dead. I remember a prayer over me last year, before I know where money would come from, that I would be fed by ravens, & so it has been. God remind us teach us what it is to trust in provision & how you would have us do that in this season. Please provide what we need, & bring. the dead. to life. Help me to mean it, help me to see it, help me to participate.

1Ki18-19 Much too much in this bumper issue. Obadiah our ecologist demonstrates a right fear of God that is prophet-feeding and creation caring .. Know that truth-tellers qua truth-tellers will be known as troublers. In such contexts as we are each called to make God conspicuous we should seek that sort of triply saturated soaking such that the fire which consumes us would be God alone .. Under our broom tree: if we have been fed by ravens, if we have seen the fire and felt the rain. How is it that we, as Elijah, still haemorrhage faith? Drenching is an opportunity, in our wet weakness God is strong.

1Ki20-21 I don't know how to apply this to our mercy justice mercy justice, how best to read it through an NT lens.. Like the Arameans I let God be the God of the hills & not the valleys, quick to compartmentalise, dichotomise, rationalise. Forgive me, come & be God. God of the valleys. Advice to a sullen king: a Satrean self-assertion that could be a popular self-help. These are not God's ways.

1Ki22 Here how we, like these, hate those who speak to us the hard prophecies. And so homogeneously we huddle, huddled amongst those who tell us the 'peace, peace' we want to hear. .. Here how we really do hope our masks will save us, and so, overboldly, into battle to a disguised demise, with our papier mache identity impotent against the slings and arrows. So how should we properly prepare and protect? Unsure, but by a right fear of God and a speaking plainly of the enemy who is there. (/)

texting two samuel

2011-08-07T02:07:00.009+01:00

Withward with words, daily. If you'd like to play too - 07729056452.

2Sm1-2 I find myself taking for granted the strength of the grace with which David comports himself towards Saul, even after death, that and/by his total conviction in God's active explicit anointing. Initially and still uncommentrarily confused: Saul died falling on his sword, only later, leaning on his spear he was euthanised by this mercy killer? All is not fair in war, and love's lost here against one unforgiven who, as an Amalekite, may have known not what he was doing? Living by the sword: is this dramatic prose a celebration of violence or? Yet should we celebrate the spiritually skillful, writing reading biographies of those who have lived by the Eph6:17 sword, dramatically.

2Sm3-5 Hope fulfilled is a tree of life, says Prov13v12. We talk a lot about hope, hope for the very big & the very small, each day trees of life as well as waiting's heartsickness. This was David's biggest hope finally fulfilled, becoming king. The promise of anointing way back when, followed by persecution. & here it is, a longing fulfilled. Everything is different, & also it's business as usual. Promises fulfilled among blood & politics & decisions to be made. So every tree of life. Let us not romanticise God. As with all romanticising it will come to steal true romance.

2Sm6-7 Oh Uzziah. God will be met. God will be met on his terms, or punishment or consequences will thus be meted. Under Waterloo Bridge this evening was a clarinet, and passing pausing a group with a three-year-old leaping and dancing to the jazz, all head over hands happy. Leaping and dancing because we are free, free to seem a fool and be despised. Oh how we the dancing generation fall short. Houses yeh, there is a king, there is a kingdom and there will come a time you'll see, when housebuilders will not break your heart. 7v10 Dwell. Let us glimmer a picture of this for all to hope by.

2Sm8-9 Much in this ancient Hebrew worldview I struggle to enter into, even imaginatively, but here is something to make real – David asks who he can show kindness to. This is a prayer to start the morning. Yesterday, half-resigned to it being a personless bubble of a day I asked God that someone would disturb me with some need, & so it was. Intentionally, pray this: who can I show kindness to today? Then see it, then be kind. Every small kindness has currency in this kingdom, I might just believe it.

2Sm10-11 Of beards and the hearsay of illadvisors, how should we then fight? As sources of conflict abound in this world, how can we but, how can we not? There is something in both these chapters against sending others to fight in your stead, the Ammonite stirrers sending mercenary hired hands, and David sending Uriah. .. Lust here is not minor fall but a major drift. How do we try to rinse/deflect/atone our home sins on foreign battlefields? Where is the cost of our shame paid abroad? Do not deal in shame, don't import it, don't export, don't propagate it. Jesus has set you free so be free. .. And don't shave men's beards?

2Sm12 What do I covet? Whose only lamb do I steal from a place of plenty? The fact that I can't immediately answer this question suggests that I, like David, don't know myself well enough, don't feel my sin acutely enough. For a Nathan's analogising that my eyes might be opened that the repentant road be taken. Of David's prayers for his son's life, a between place, a grey place, a difficult place.. Might we take from this passage that between places qua their betweeness offer a unique opportunity for a particular kind of conversation with God, of fasting, weeping & lying on the floor. An urgency, intensity & intentionality of prayer which breeds intimacy with God. Questions are what we do when we don't know, seeking is what we do when we don't have. Such times are holy.

2Sm13-14 13v21 Bad men who previously did bad things can say and do nothing when their bad sons consult bad friends to plot bad things. Lust's major drift steers its mess into the next generation and on Amnon.. Unleashed lust cannot be undone: a failure in sexual restraint will render you voiceless to restrain worse excesses by those who follow from you. So, true love, for their sake, waits. 14v19 'on me be the guilt..' and the cost of active parenting.. Still bemused by irrelevant aesthetic qualifications. And weighing hair. Srsly.

2Sm15 The servant king on the mount of olives, returning the will to power with grace upon grace. Jesus. Jesus. We will go with you wherever you go.

2Sm16-17 In these rooftop sexual politics lust's mess ploughs on, the messers becoming the messees. Our enemy today is not impersonal as they would have us believe, we do not battle merely the inevitable force of market forces and the heartless, mindless evolution of cruel determinism. Our reality remains one of persons persuadable saveable. Ours is still a contest against Absaloms. Have we an ear behind those enemy lines? Have we a plan? Have we a trust in God? Have we a cross-country, joined-up, hands-on eagerly anticipated sense that we are participating in the restoration of God's true king? Your work, dear one, is important and excellent: idea's consequences: the gift to fight for the right view of God, for a knowledge of his present presences, known and spoken, is yours.

2Sm18-19 Do we construct our lives, motives, battles on such a basis as Absalom: do we gather sympathisers to an antihero-ic and react-ive cause borne of begrudged grievance? We are yet forgiveable. Forgiveable, mourned for and longed for by God as/if/even/when we, entangled by our pride, die on that battlefield. .. Do we seek to restore peace and unity? Even as a smaller side, fear not, the v8 forest is for us. .. Mercy takes v14 time, oh that we might waste some in saving lives today. .. Of 19, a sort of hug-a-hoodie lesson in the hows of peace-making? Unsure. Certainly we are all guilty at such riotous times, as now, even of negligence, even of inaction. Humbly let us out-reach the sceptics in our outreach.

2Sm20-21 If David is our Christ figure, Joab consistently evokes the name of David to justify his own agenda, but fails to listen. Let us agenda surrender. 21v1-4 justice? really? v15-22 slaying giants, a different picture to 1Sm17, a David dependent on the help of others, as we, this week.

2Sm22-23 Whether or not God is in the earthquake, his still small voice will come, untimeably as an earthquake, even ruinously to the landscape of our presuppositions. .. Of the spatiality of distress, and its opposite, a trust in God: 22v20 'broad space' 1Sm30v6 (lit.) 'the matter is narrow for.' Faithless ways I dig myself into a hole reveal my flight from God as a kind of agrophobia. .. Mighty men: 23v20, Mt12v1-8, 1Sm21. We are chosen and purposed like this, as David's men, as Jesus' disciples, to go into tight spaces and fight lions on snowy days, to defend lentils. What a calling.

2Sm24 Initially confused as to David's sin, the 1Chr21 version tells us that it was Satan not God who moved David to take the census. A mistranslated ambiguous indexical maybe, but it puts me in mind of the fear and trembling I feel on thinking that Satan used scripture to tempt Jesus in the wilderness, & discernment is a weighty game. As David here, as Jesus, our conscience our atunement with God's spirit is so needed. God, teach me costly sacrifice pleasing to you & help me to mean it.

home.

2011-08-06T11:26:00.003+01:00

For Joe.
Economic incentives and ecological imperatives.
Today, for joy, through Christ, today.

texting one samuel

2011-07-25T23:12:00.007+01:00

Two chapters, chewed over and texted of a morning. If you'd like to play too - 07729056452.

1Sm1-2 God is with us in our barrenness. It is enough. By that and through that it is the making-meaningful of every circumstance that is worthy of songs, hymns and magnificats. And yet there are those who miss it, who, even being so close to things so miraculous, who choose quicker gratifications. Would that all sons might know that God is not like their father Eli, not quick to judge drunk, not anxious about his reputation. So in the knowledge of the God who comes running, let us love this Friday.

1Sm3 Started some wonderings about difficult words & all prophecy being for edification & that, but these thoughts seem dry & useless. I make all my narratives objectifications, & so also the narratives about my narratives. Speak Lord. Instruct me, make me teachable, learning from Eli so that I might learn to say with a whole heart that your servant is listening. Speak & disrupt my stories, categories, expectations. Need you. Speak so that I'm more than this clattering monologue, speak that I'd speak, speak that things happen. Tell us what's on your heart. We would sleep in your sanctuary so that we might hear & recognise your voice, speak, Lord, because you speak.

1Sm4 A chapter full of griefs, losses & humiliations. If the covenant box is the site of divine disclosure, & we know this to be our hearts bodies minds, can this be stolen? What comes to steal divine presence, divine conversation?

1Sm5-6 Divining signs and distinguishing coincidences out of the signal to noise ratio of God's will.. The gods aren't angry but. So many ways God shares a shelf with Dagons in my life, so many ways the kibod of God is not given its due weight in my life. This is life out of balance whence comes our tumours. So repentance, that our prayers may not be hindered.

1Sm7-8 Samuel led well, settling disputes, serving as a judge, building altars to the one God, interceding for a faithless people without overlooking their idols. & then we have bad reasons for seeking a leader, motivations of status, custom, false security. Let us seek God that we would not wound him, for God knows all our rejections of him, the all-powerful has made himself vulnerable before our choice.

1Sm9-10 What is handsome? The bible here has no qualms at adopting this problematic disney criteria of comparative description and discrimination. Used here in a cautionary context perhaps but why? It still stands to legitimate aesthetic partiality. Perhaps the translation could come softer 'considered handsome'? .. The culturally beautiful and less blemished are popularly esteemed as moral role models: how should we then look? How should we then look on those? Of kingship, there is a contradiction at play here that I have not squared, that Samuel would speak so strongly against this institution, and its vanity, and then verses later the text condemns Saul for hiding from it, and worthless fellows for doubting it. Anyways. Know we now that same speaking, rushing-upon spirit of God is ours today and more so, go we into today to speak expectant elaborate specific future tenses.

1Sm11-12 More questions. Genuine questions, but maybe we can tentatively hypothesise a little. Correct me. There is no one correct model of leadership? There are seasons for types of leadership? It was sinful to seek a king in this context because it was a rejection of God, a failure of trust. We are apt to make idols of our leaders? We use leaders to try to mediate with a God who whishes to be immediate and unmediated. Holding kingship & Christ together, our analogies become idolatries if we hold them too tightly or hold them wrongly. Buber talks of idolatry not being a simple substitute of something else for God in the place of our worship, but also in the way we relate to the onjet of our worship, we need to repsect the disanalogies between the way we are to relate to God and all & and human relationship in order both that these latter relationships can healthily image the divine, & that our relation to God our source, centre, sovereign, saviour does not become damaged in its being diluted or distorted by all that is incomparable in human relationships. Positively, leaders are defenders of those they are responsible for. Hmm. Go is always pleased to make us his. Breathe that in.

1Sm13-14 Funny that here at home also we wrestle in the meeting of tardiness and the well-intentioned impatience of an aging, risk-averse king? Setting arbitrary oaths is a symptom of losing fresh faith. Contrasted with Jonathan's but-if-not.. So, come, let us risk for it may be that God.. Come, nothing can hinder God from saving.

1Sm15-16 'I did obey the Lord' – not the first time Saul has convinced himself of his own godliness. how do we deceive ourselves, how do we rationalise our disobedient choices? This the desire to be our own god, the arrogance as sinful as idolatry. The end of Saul's strange reign & David's anointing a painful mess, church politics nothing new under the sun.. what might we learn about unity? The story would be different if Saul's desperate power-grasping had instead been humility. Today seeking the God who already knows, the God who looks at the heart.

1Sm17 What has not already been said of this story but that it is true and particular for you on July's 23rd. Something a little Just William in David's dialogue made me to smile on my way. And oh that we would come at modernity 'with sticks' so to the woods. Spiritual jiujitsu is a true truth and we should aspire to those pebbles, to be even extremely small but incredibly well aimed, so in our gathering and all our concepts of scale. Small is beautiful and urgent. Struck by Eliab and his cruel why in this reading: discouraged discouragers, I have know this slippery slope. God stay me.

1Sm18-19 I feel for Saul. It is painful to feel that someone else has been chosen & you have not, that God is with them in a way that God is not with you. A new testiment lens changes our theology, but we can identify the feeling of abandonment. How do we then live? Perhaps we could take from this passage that abandonment to God is the way to quell competitive comparing.

1Sm20-21 These friendships are the bromances we can, in our Life less proud, be so opened to, a yet foreign intensity of filial affection, what must we do to find such, what common cause creates such comradeship? These adventures are true myths, like the one we would be swept up in: church as an mmpg enfleshed: on a mission, for a cause, against opposing enemies run we with coded encouragement and strange assistance. I will ask for the bread we need from the God who is still good, I will be a fool, seem a fool and be despised, on that path of trust, in the cause of love, in the eyes of all, in the face of doubt, now in the arms of one, let us be as Jonathan to the other and more on mission.

1Sm22-23 Fragments. Bits of David's character come through that don't quite make for a tidy meditation, so is real life, what a strange rush of fragments of thoughts sleep dreams prayers. There was something about David – what makes someone such that when trying to hide he is sought out by the needy to lead? David who notices the one, who shoulders responsibility, an adventurer carer? David of straightforward conversation with God. Hello God, you are God, we acknowledge you, we surrender. Our 'shall I..?' 'will this..?' We beg you to answer. Lead us.

1Sm24-25 Mercy justice mercy justice. The best I can do for 24 is perhaps to ask what it would be to cut the corner off capitalism's cloak? 25, Abigail here with her mercy sheeps, a woman with a plan, a lady with a lamp, a long sufferer, a visionary peacemaker, an adventuring carer, here risking in midnight mediation. Thus should we be. The non-violent world we all want cannot be come to by mere passive resistance, but by active insistence on another's behalf, may we be gifting go-betweeners, mercy mediators, defending even the rightly maligned, speaking at cost for the foolishly blind, because love wins, because God will judge, because God is still good.

1Sm26-27 Keep on keeping on, for days will follow days follow this one. When the same enemy attacks again, bring it to God with honest frustration his 54th Psalm, this is what intimacy with God looks like & remembering that God is good & to be trusted, again againembody love from the difficult place, mercy has not limit. How to square with David's subsequent decamp to the Phillistines, unsure. A running away? Or somehow the overflow of this trust? Discernment we ask for.

1Sm28-29 Consulting the dead, oh what a world is this we live in. In that state of divine disconnect, when we choose against God, we are at the mercy of any advice, strung out, strung along, filled by any fattened calf.. Then they rose and went away that night, badland drifters, as you say, abandoned by for not being abandoned to. Now David cannot, and neither we, be allied to any other. Try as we may, in trying to ease our exile, we are marked by an alterior, somewhat as AIIIH's Daniel last night, doubted by deputies, for better and worse. We can pretend a peace in peacetime but we will have to pick a side and we have already been picked.

1Sm30-31 Rescue Missions: These are God's work in us & our work in God. Restoration from captivity & then some to give away. Is David's distribution premised on Matt20's grace or Rom12's gifts? ..And when does it matter? Saul & the importance of funerals, to you in the west country as you celebrate the importance of weddings.

texting ruth

2011-07-23T10:53:00.005+01:00

Texting the Ruth in love, here's something of our to-and-fro. If you'd like to play - 07729056452.

Rt1 In life we are sometimes sojourning, sometimes remaining, God purposes both and has kindnesses for us to embody in both. If we are Naomi, who is our Ruth to guide and to release? If we are Ruth, who is our Naomi, whom shall we cling to in the time of their need, whom shall we glean with/for in steadfast and pursuing kindness? You, better than I by far, in your gifting to gift the needy with the kind kind of prescencing-to they need.

(Of Rt2) Better slower, left as sheaves for your gleaning, but, of Rt2, are we being taught courtship in Boaz, or charity, for his is ambiguously extravagant generosity

Rt2 This is grace. That gives without telling, ninja gifting, secret blessing that does not seek its own recognition of thanks, such a love that really does prefer the other. Would that I would be. This the agape we are always to embody, & let our agape go beyond Boaz's, let us be kind to those of whom we have heard no good report. Every stranger to be welcomed. Of charity & courtship, we met as strangers once. Agape the foundation of friendship turned romance, let us never forget the agape foundation of our spiralling deeper, higher.

Rt3 Ruth, I ain't saying she's a gold digger, but. For all the feminism one may want from this, how should we, should we make paradigmatic the Boazaic barley bread winner? If yes, it is a Driscollian yes to find your bible-goodjob-house man. And then, if then, to be a little bit scandalous when his heart is a little bit merry? Leaving our romances aside, can we apply this to our Romance: where are Christ's feet, what is His blanket, when is the night? More than that, but now tenuously, in our redemption that Christ bought us, who was our mother-in-law, who are our nearer non-redeemers? We are imaging weighty things for which, graciously, we are, in Christ alone, sufficient.

Rt3 (ii) (via 41 breakfast) Can we speak this of mail-order-brides as possible refugee-redeemers? And other extrapolations.. Jesus is Boaz, we are curled up at his feet dependently. Or, Jesus is the blanket, and on Calvary God suffers the cold of night as Jesus is pulled away by us? Or Jesus is the wine of God's merriment, by which God looks upon us favourably? And the Holy Spirit is the 6 measures of barley, note not yet 7 .. Over egged exegeting. Let us make of wednesday a wedding feast, let us love all as if we have been redeemed, let us love in the strength of his barley down payment.

Rt4 The NIV uses 'redeem' & the GNB 'buy'. A scene such as this causes disquiet not only it its picture of the commodification of women, but all my struggles with monetary analogies for sin & redemption which I want protest. What do we mean when we say we were bought at a cost as it, indeed, mail-order brides? I cannot always get stuck here, forgive me, & a picture of redemption I do see, of pursuit, the restoration of things lost, new & more-than-imagined things, fruit bourn, a story to tell. Love will save the day.

in the woods

2011-07-22T23:52:00.005+01:00

Design and make-believing last weekend, when architecture was as a tree, as it ought and delights to be, in the woods and free, in the fields, among and of the trees, by with from the trees. Would that architecture were made not manufactured; so, wood, that architecture be made not manufactured. Lovers, for the joy:

Elsewhere blogged:
hh/pc - bd - aj - mtw - fb-group - fb-event

together

2011-07-10T23:37:00.003+01:00

Seeing the climactic backyard football scene now in context does render the recommended application for St Mary's in a new light. Here is a very human film about the difficulties of life together, with emphasis given to certain stumbling blocks. I find here a certain resignation, a cynicism, in the story telling, it is knowing in its portrayal of idealisms as they run awry, and believable in its cautionary caricature of the immaturity of such communitistic ambitions.

The depiction of a liberal and unboundaried life and sexuality comes critically with a frank exploration of the chaotic consequences of such and offers no simple formula for a better way. We see here over-reactive self-definitions, the swinging away from the abusive to the permissive, an over-compensation which I cannot see being resolved in a middle ground but rather a third way yet to be found. I cannot hear another sermon about community, I do not need to be told that it is not good for trinitarian image bearers to be alone any more than I in a car crash need to be told about ambulances. If not in the atomised, alcoholic, pornographic isolation of the nuclear family and not in the blurred lawless porridge of a life communal, how shall we then live?

We are not two we are one. Goren's monistic porridge parable is a fairly precise summary of the appeal and the danger of this worldview, seen also in Buddhist Babylons, where we hedge our bets, auction our souls, sacrifice our singularity to be absorbed indistinguishably into the blurred, bland but secure depersonal soup. If we are to live together let us do so as pork cutlets, let us be discernible and delicious. I am not you and in that there is glory. God will sustain you beyond the city gates, and in that there is freedom to commune excellently, as a body more than the sum of its distinct parts.

Washing up. The chore which tidily bookends Together, it is a kind of foot washing and illustrates the degree to which a community's survival needs washing up initiators and a community's thriving needs washing up initiators and so we see a certain self-evidence to the qualification for servant leadership.

A great film onto which I have projected a tedious, moralising review. Do see this picture and feed me how we should then live. And enjoy reds washing red wine out of a red shirt.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0203166/

the adjustment bureau

2011-07-10T23:31:00.003+01:00

Behind the curtain. Because there is a curtain and not simply the cell membrane of our ego, behind that curtain of the world we see are the movers who define our helpless existences. And they are exhausted bureaucrats, Vogons, Agent Smiths, designed via cinematic precedent and the widest audience's deepest fear: the suits at the end of the universe, men in this case and typically, here impersonally calculating and criticising our failures to achieve: that greatest failure, to fail to be the you you could be, you are obliged to your potential fame, potential power, potential personal wealth. God has a wonderful plan for your life and it as impossible and as it prescriptive and joyless: damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Chance and the one. That narrow road that leads to a New Yorker's marital bliss is 9 million to 1, a lost cause, 3 years on the same bus is foolish love unless we believe in fated love. Do we?

Run Lola, Run Neo, Run Forest, Run. Modernity and its goons are both the where and whence of our frenetic running, modernity is exhausting and pervasive and in that way cannot be fixed by a vacation. We become the sabbathless striving that we consider the world to be made of and made for.

Hollywood humanism's selective history. The most interesting of this film's betrayals of its true affections was the suggested threshold of 1910, at which point adjustment was paused until 1962 which lays bare a lingering faith in the modernist project. The world wars were not a hiccup in our Enlightenment, but an inseparable product.

Love wins. The climax sees these persistent widows get their justice from that chairman who neither fears God nor respects men. Happy would I have been to let brief love be love's reward, as better as it is to have loved and lost, but here Hollywood promises a time coming when we will have our love cake and eat it, when love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears, when we will be free to win love unlimited.

See this film for a tidy clever little plot, see this film for its dance. Dance here is as music in the Lives of Others, it is why we are, oh to carry our bodies through space creatively. Brief moments of sheer beauty in this blockbuster.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1385826/

badlands

2011-07-10T23:28:00.002+01:00

A film about the frontiers of boredom, the causes and the consequences of that restless state. Boredom is escapism is a running away, a negatively defined space, a weightlessness, floating on a breeze, idle idlers washed down the river. Drawn out and on by a hope for a purer space, away from painted advertisements and the blood sacrifices of our fathers' former way, away from the rigours of ritual to that being present unto sunsets and beetles and rustled winds, all this but at a cost. Those who would seize the Kingdom by violence deny the very thing which makes the good life good, and that is the gift of it. So drift we with them in this parable without a punchline, and they, taking time, killing time, from killing, they make forts: a particularly architectural mode of therapy.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069762

ring of bright water

2011-07-10T23:21:00.004+01:00

This is the Britain I was supposed to return to in 1997, this, a happily ever after England of caricatures and talking beasts, the rural real and the good life easily won.

The rural real is a myth reserved for children's television, that somehow, somewhere there exist make do and mend communities uncomputerised by computers, unfettered by pension predictions and undependent on the city's smoke. But I, in my dozen lives, have never encountered the countryside as other than recreational, subsidised, dormitory, commuted from and through.

Watching now for the first time since I was more the target audience of this, the jaunty woodwind and the interior monologue lend a pantomine clumsiness to the goings on and there is a weary ecologism pushed in mixed messages. But all is forgiven for the aquarium, and all that it inspired in its heroic, improbable, improvised loveliness.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064893/

texting judges

2011-07-03T11:55:00.006+01:00

Still constructing texts from Texts, gleaning a tweet's-worth to carry us through the day, here's something of our to-and-fro. If you'd like to play - 07729056452.

Jg1-2 And the Israelites were doing so well.. Is 'Judges' a helpful title for these characters, how do we picture their contribution? 2v19..worse than before. What stop-gap sticky-plaster solutions do we try to stem sin's flow by? Rather than the inevitability of winding down, vicious and cruel cycles, the lows of which will propel us alaskawards.. rather let us seek and savour a present possible forgivefullness, as much as we oscillate, we may hope to know Christ better than our fathers?

Jg3-5 Loud but temporary leadership exacerbates the cyclicness of our cyclicly sinful lives... Peaking mountain top fervour with ugly war songs to a tribal god to troughs of worshipless indifference. Leadership leadership. How did Moses Joshua do differently in trying to woo faithless Israel from her sin?

Jg6-7 In a mockery of our rationalisms, best intentions and measured ambitions to do good, God here chooses to be known and celebrated through the seemingly imprudent impractical selection of one outnumbered and underqualified. God proceeds to humour and accomodate the doubting reluctant forgetful cowering coward's if-whys and if-thens, that in all He might be known as the sufficient one. The God-hypothesis in which we are adventuring offers to be qualified and proved by signs. In proving a God most other we should anticipate adventure. How?

Jg8 Forgivenesslessness & justify yourself. Forgivenesslessness & vengeance. & we? I can only think of how Jesus inverted subverted converted such a way as this: Turn the other cheek, pray for your enemies; remaking justice, remaking honour, remaking the interpersonal, remaking paradigms of masculinity. Remaking theism from superstition into faith's foulweather endurance, casual idolatry into purity of heart. It ends well.

Jg 9 Violence multiplies, always. Here I would parallel Ab's cruel striving for uncontested leadership to last night's Thessalonican discussion of the now-not-yet dimensions of 2Th2:3-4's lawless one. Paul issues apocalyptic warning because such striving proclivities, such aggressive hierarchies, and the insecurities of ill-wrought and unshared selfish leadership are ruinous in the now. Trees, ESVSB claims this happy quartet of parabolic plants is not an indictment of the institute of kingship. But. It strikes one that the trees would have been more fruitful left in an anarchist's agraria.. Left to produce wine pleasing to a God seemingly partial to a glass, a happy image. Here also we see the measure Ab used measured against him running over in the way of a cleanly consequentialist God of karma?

Jg10-11 Jephthah a hero of faith? His daughter the lesser-known Abraham's Isaac unsaved by faith, a happy ending hard to find. Because of foolish human promise? If your yes is yes & your no no, then be careful, very careful what you promise. We need stories of Isaacs & miracles to increase our faith. to know that with God all things are possible.. but also such stories of senseless tragedy. Were we better at telling these stories would there be less disillusionment, less church pain? Remembering this morning that God is not proud, he will have us even when he is our last resort.

Jg12-13 The slaughter of the lispless siblings: God in a long journeying-with has not dechosen this one so divided within itself and self-destructive. Now Samson. Out of the promise of the miraculous comes 'mission' and 'manner of life'. Such supernatural foundation is the necessary and sufficient for those that would be other than pew fodder, but happily such is the nature of all true new births: we each are ones untimely reborn and as such are enmissioned to such a life that demands/permits/enables that we be remannered. Stop doubting, Phil, and believe. Spirit of God rush upon us.

Jg 14-16 Questions splay out in many directions. If we allow the philistines to represent godlessness, samson still acts in & from deceit, disobedience, greed, lust, small-mindedness, pride & more. Wordplay as a weapon? Such are our heroes of Hebrews. The encouragement again that God uses such as these, we can never be too ugly or unwise to be beyond divine purposing. A warning also that being filled with the spirit does not make us automatically immune to bad & broken decisions. We should never follow even the Godly uncritically or unprayerfully & we should never defer our inalienable responsibility, even to God. Samson shrugging responsibility for his fire foxes rampage, but not as surrender submission. What is my responsibility & what is God's responsibility? Seek wisdom/wisdom comes from the Lord.

Jg17-18 What is kingship? Here Judges, it seems, is written as a cautionary tale by later kings defending kingship? What is kingship and why did/does evil prevail? In the not-yet of our now-and-not-yet, at all the scales at which we lead and are lead, and by all the necessary compromises we employ, falling short of genuine theocracy as we do, is there really an option other than anarchy or acknowledged and intentional kingship? A little lost for application as we near the climax of this lawless spiral.. we, do we, are we settled Levites ever? Priests for hire, sold-out second-besters? Could we be better lead?

Jg 19-21 At a stretch these last three chapters manifest something of sin's state as divided & divisive, the 'double-mindedness' of James 1:8. A sinful heart & its action wars against itself, as in the procrastination of ch19's beginning which I identify in myself – this a self-deception, a compartmentalisation, the deferral of responsibility, an escapist flight from reality. This dividedness playing out in the anger at injustice done where one is complicit, or more than complicit, in its enactment, the picture of this levite's anger at the abuse of the woman he himself 'sent outside' to be so abused an absurdity in its self-deception. And so the dividedness of Israel against itself, the body's civil-warring & the strange grief for their lost tribe at the end, seemingly dissociative in a lack of acknowledging that it was they who brought about these painful circumstances. Dividedness is deceit is darknes. & this may be a picture of my heart & actions. But Christ is the light of the world, all things will be brought into the light.

texting joshua

2011-06-26T12:38:00.011+01:00

Constructing texts from Texts, gleaning a tweet's-worth to carry us through the day, here's something of our to-and-fro. If you'd like to play - 07729056452.

Js1-2 (v3) Step out, faith first – we are not to be passive blessees. Adventuring: as we constructed our south London lives as liberation narratives, as of Exodus, as of Attack the Block, let us consider our breaking and entering lives, as Jackie P, into another walled city: Hope to break in that Hope might break out. The God of the poor and the prostitute, here found in an architecture of nooks and fringes, and I am flooded with flashbacks to lego cities and school assemblies, an education that with serious play offered to furnish me with eyes to see the world for the fortresses it is. Hoping to break in with you, that Hope would abound.

Js2-3 Rahab an 'outsider' recognising the power of the living God, the God of heaven & earth. This God is to be taken seriously, this God is real. We have heard of your God of miracles & they need her. Affirming that the other always has something to teach me, gift me. Always in humility holding the truth of the God of river-stopping miracles, this to dialogical evangelism.

Js4-5 Land Art and the Lamp of Memory: What do these stones mean to you (v6)? What do these stones mean (v21)? Subjective/Objective meaning makers we are? A world without miracles has little worth memorialising, but we, how can we not? Would not the stones themselves cry out? This is place-making as worship via testimony and it *needs* to be done... God is not for us (v14), not as a mercenary, not as a cajoleable ally, not as a fraction among our ranks, not a contingency plan. God is for our better best, he is the extent, the limit, the only measure by which we can hope to battle the day through, he is our primary presupposition. He is God, we are his.

Js6 The question we've been taught this story to ask - “What is my Jericho?” “What is my walking & my shouting & how long are my 7 days?” Helpful questions, though that there are divine goals & a divine methodology a truth to apply to all our comings & goings, before attempts to crowbar tidy answers to fit these questions in the vein of immature projected biblical heroism. Maybe. Divine methodology here, trust, dependence, obedience, what else? Reading this story for its familiar message another question might be ''what is God's Jericho?' & I am, we are. 'tightly shut up' with nothing going in or out like my closed fists, my lack of surrender, my closed-up-in-myself-ness. God's work is my invasion, he employs the funniest of ways to enact the crumbling of our walls, the assault of our hearts in violent non-violence in order to make us his.

Js7-8 The righteous rise early for the a.m.'s annointing (v16) (as 6v15). Unhelpful to try to correlate our defeats with destructive devotions we may have engaged, but.. Ill-gotten, ill-intended, ill-devoted gain – like meat sacrificed to idols.. What is under your tent? Heaps of stones, heaps of stones and ruins: monuments to faith, monuments to unfaith..

Js9 The Gibeonites, hearing of the power of God & coming deceitfully. Some sort of correlate to a heart attitude I have, that I think I can deceive God, bargain with, reason with, make my protestations to God. Pretending before God! What an absurdity... & all pretence is pretence before God, these double lives we lead, as I profess to know that God sees & knows, brings things from darkness to light. Be unafraid in your honesty, be uncompromising in demanding mine, as we seek to image the divine. I wonder in this narrative what God would have said to an enquiring Joshua, but believing that God has a way for the unpretending, this story glimpses of grace on contact with truth brought to light.

Js10-11 Being and bullet-time. Do not be anxious about times, timing, deadlines, tick tocking clocks whining, ruling, reigning in against our patient faithing, our bold sabbathing. Time is elastic for our meteorological God, do not be anxious. Temporal rules bent, rules broken: do not be ruled by less than God. Prayers also that we would not wear ourselves out in the effort of suspending in tension the love justice of our God in these confusing passages. Do we give blood sweat tears in prayer: fighting prayers prayed against an active evil?

Js12-14 Old triumphs remembered & the vision for land yet to be taken. This becoming a familiar pattern, this our allotted tension, it will never be otherwise, we should not disdain it, it will never be easier, but we may be more & better. That there's more land to be taken is not a failure but a flourishing. Knowing our land allotment, what's given us, what contigent materials we work with, our sphere of influence. Promised land & promises hoped for, waitings for 45 years. Caleb's mould to meditate, seemingly not comparing his lot to Joshua's, though they began together, putting his feet in the right place, following wholeheartedly, waiting faithfully.

Js15-17 This land is your land, this land is my land.. We are this and not that, here and not there, now and not then. Our particular place is portioned and purposed in this particulate universe. Let us be allotmenteers to the glory of god, savour the ground. Ours is a fractal god, concerned to have stewarding done excellently and personally at each scale of existence and experience of a world that is so much richer for its more-than-one-ist otherness.

Js18-19 "How long will you wait before you taken the land the Lord has given you?" A righteous rebuke, coming with weight and urgency. We must hear this, the NIV reporting that the danites "had difficulty" taking their land, which prompted a smile, not of irony but of warmth for human clumsiness, contingency, finitude. Enjoyment of the humanity of these books, the lists & laws & mundane histories, the quirks & the ordinary & the ineptitude. Two lenses for our failings (ambiguous pronoun, prompting when who hows ), the tragic & the comic, both perhaps important.

Js 20-22 Refugee refuges here reiterated. How is your space and the defence it offers to the defenceless? Justice and true worship would/will prevail if/when we made more of this in our home policy and our Home policy. Misunderstood altars: here, just in case, fearing rightly a holy God who is just in love, Israelite body members seeks to keep the whole body from the consequences of idolatry by even its smaller body parts. For all my excitement in stones, land art and meaning making, please check me on my altar building motives. For our sake keep me from skubalon.

Js23-24 A swirling swirl of interconnected commitment, covenant, bearing witness, jealousy. Brought to mind the witnesses to our formal covenants, baptisms, marriages, & the witnesses to our everyday covenants, for in such a universe as this there are many sacraments. Holy jealousy flowing from this, jealousy proper of a holy eros, of a one true God, of marriage's right exclusions. Unlike our broken jealousies of possessiveness & insecurity, this is an overflow not a lack from belonging not resentment. The life lived from this.. as for me & my household, we will serve the Lord.

texting deuteronomy

2011-06-18T21:30:00.009+01:00

Constructing texts from Texts, gleaning a tweet's-worth to carry us through the day, here's something of our to-and-fro. If you'd like to play - 07729056452.

Dt1 Do not fear. Do not be dismayed. Do not be in dread. Do not be afraid. Hebrew would help us, the many ways we run away, the varied shapes of dread and panic and ambivalence, all godless. Oh that his yet-in-spite-of would be matched by a faithful but-if-not from we, who journey through a wilderness 'great and terrifying' - a comfortingly less neutral descriptor than I have been apt to ascribe to the Israelite experience in no-man's-land.

Dt2-3 Reading the 1st-person narrative in the light of its recent recounting in the 3rd-person prompts thoughts on perspective, matched by content that we may never enter into that worked for, its fullness for our children, for others. The narrative bigger than our own, 'to live is Christ' perhaps the divine perspective to measure Moses' success for his part & ours.

Dt4-6 What is the meaning of the way you live? Calls here for intentionality and purity because we are intragenerationally culpable. Yesterday's 3rd-persons unto the 3rd generation are hanging round our neck. They are Russian dolls bobbing in the ripple's ripple of our life now. So be wary that idol factory, but not afraid, unafraid because even amongst the heat of the machines fabricating insensible senseless gods, even there God wants to be found. So for the love of God let us tattoo our factory door posts that he may be found therein.

Dt7 If the -ites are my idolatry, complacency directed thus will not do. Active & passive in the command to tear down idolatrous alters. & the reminder that it is god who destroys, drives out. Even we may be fully transformed. Even we. Quick to believe there are things that can never be redeemed i forget that God is v19-20 terrible miraculous wonderful powerful strong present great..he will destroy all our idols& this process of sanctification happens 'little by little" as we advance - this aligning with conversations i had yesterday. Idols are not eliminated all at once, god knows how we are to be transformed as a process, a journey, strung out from year to year, obedience to obedience, remembering to remembering. This a painful glorious tension, god's power & our process.

Dt8-10 In case we forget that we forget, remember: You deserve nothing of what you have. Nothing, and certainly none of it came by your strength and certainly none of it is by our righteousness. And this is Good News! The utter giftness of everything obliges us, freed into an hilarious boastless lovering. Love. The. Sojourner. And wear your clothes hard. Freed for freedom, loved to love. Swept up in a beautiful thing we are.

Dt11 The here&now, present&personal held together with our thoughts on generations past & future. The connection between commands kept & blessing in the vein of proverbs, against the grain of job - a synthesis of old testament worldviews to add to our rethinking of Life and of the Way. Verbs here given as such commands: Love, remember, observe, (faithfully) obey, be (careful), cherish, afix, teach, write, walk (in his ways), hold fast.

Dt12-14 Deuteronomic deja vu, this book is four sermons preached by a finite knower to a forgetful people. What is your life's sermon? Who your life's people? Here exhorted are old covenant concerns symbolic (and superstitious?) regarding place, platters and people. However, can we say that even under the new covenant we are still humans, local, nodal placemakers choreographing corporately around irreducibly located locations. We are still eaters symbolically, making God-honouring dining decisions derived from categories that are more poetic than mere nutrition and hygiene. And we are still people for whom if may not be unfruitful to support the unmeritocratic employment of the unelected, with their Levitical wisdom, to serve our national interests. Too great a leap? Let us join with this passage in it recognition and celebration of the symbolic and storied over the strictly and simplistically efficient.

Dt15-16 Generosity as breathing, & the purity of heart that goes with it, like Paul's 'without selfish ambition & cheap desire', bewaring the use of perceived generosity for one's own strategic self-interest. Cancel all your debts! What a radical system were we really to do likewise. How open-handedness & tight-fistedness would be brought into the light, otherwise easy to hide behind convention. Don't hold on to anything too tightly. Resentment a heart attitude underpinning all manner of lifelessness.

Dt17-19 Be unpresuming prophets priests and kings. Money-Sex-Power affects our capacity to hear-fear God: consider the ways our sex deafens us, consider the ways we false-prophesy on monied assumptions, consider ways our will-full willing of/for/to power disqualifies us from adventuring in God's will in His power. Interesting the forbidding of an Egyptian re-urbanisation in search of more horse wealth. Marr's BBCi Megacities refreshed this image.

Dt20-22 Guidelines for the familial, criminal, military, religious (environmental? v19) - the domestic & the systemic more intimately interconnected than we might pretend. Here we have cross-dressing & head-shaving... contending without irony that we do better to lay these aside, we see here portraits of male power & its abuse. Granting biological difference and imbalance o physical strength, in this arena women called to trust is good men to honour & protect them rather than abuse them. As I trust you in this way we learn something of, image something of the god who could destroy us in a moment but whose love comes only as care & goodness.

Dt23-25 So immasculation was a pagan practice. Do we? On what sliding scale, with what motive? Economic laws and the world we all want.. I feel like I am peering inside not an unsophisticated ancient culture but into a just and fruitful utopia whose basic laws eschew those economic assumptions on which our world is today cruelly predicated. How can we but charge interest? Further a national political enshrining of marriage's first home year, another far-reachingly human use of legislation. Like last night's sabbathing, there is more. More we could risk, more we could profit. Oh for the imagination to See.

Dt26-27 I love this God, I want to love this God better. This God who covenants, declares, makes personal..to we who are so small. Our declarations of intent to walk in his ways, to try to love him better replied with declarations of our worth, we are this God's treasured possession. Let us stop to wonder at this, to feel him close by, to speak words of baffled gratitude, & so back to blessings and curses, God is blessing as constitutive not causal, for God is God. Writings on stones reminds of Rev2v17, God-given identity & values that go deep given a tactile hand-held reminder.

Dt28 Blessed. Conditionally? What is the timescale of obedience and its consequences for us who fashion a theology of grace? Here we see suffering's source in the siege of God? Less individualistic constructions of dis/obedience I need. Beblessedness is more than a state of mind but less than a cosmic slot machine. God in Christ does not shortcut requisite obedience in his will to bless us, but makes impossible obedience possible. We are free to risk to obey to love for joy now. We are equipped to begin a blessedness in every beattitudinal situation now. We are chosen, lucky, favoured, known, pursued, held. In the city. In the field. In our toing and froing. Ok this is it: blessable obedience is itself a blessing, wrought of grace. We are nothing apart from grace.

Dt29-30 Taped to my wall for four years now this. The answer to life & blessing...set before us ever-available, every morning a choice to live as life or to live as death. Choose life. & what is life? The Lord is your life. Love of God, the sound of his voice, holding fast to him. Choose life for the Lord is your life. The beginnings of a melting of law into love, the circumcision of our hearts, & God is very near you, in your heart & in your mouth. He is not far off, he is here to stay. Crop-planting & child-rearing, he is not far off, he is here.

Dt31-32 Be strong and courageous. He goes before you, He will not forsake you, He will be with you, He is as a rock, the solidity of ground beneath us, grounding our minds, anchoring our ambitions, founding our imaginations. He will catch you, diving after us in free-fall, He will lead you, we who need leading, need direction, need a motive force, need a sense of the B of our A to B, and as He has fed, He will feed, and will free as He has freed. There are no grounds for anxiety in a universe such as this. Be strong, you whom I love, be very courageous.

Dt33-34 Blessing the tribes, like revelation's letters to the churches, like praying for each other in homegroup. Petitions personal & specific to circumstance, struggle, thanksgiving, remembering & so on. Little else so affirming as other people's prayers spoken into us, their articulation alone a transformation of our being, our being-with-god. Others' prayers a need not a luxury, & so also our praying for, with others. Elsewhere, is it ever helpful to ask 'what is my jordan?'