Francis Bacon (Head, VI)

"Also, man now realizes that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason. I think that even when Velasquez was painting, even when Rembrandt was painting, they were still, whatever their attitude to life, slightly conditioned by certain types of religious possibilities, which man now, you could say, has had canceled out for him. Man now can only attempt to beguile himself for a time, by prolonging his life--by buying a kind of immortality through the doctors."

Does one really need the hope of an afterlife or a sense of ultimate purpose and meaning (a la Rick Warren) to live a good and enjoyable life? I think not. I enjoy my favorite brews without in any way ascribing to the experience a sense of self-evident or objective meaning. It seems to me that metaphysics, particuarly of the religious variety, gets in the way of life. It is only when we create our own limited meanings and purposes that we are freed to live in the way I think Jesus meant us to live.

Reading the Bible

It is remarkably difficult for some people to read the Bible in any other way than a straightforward narrative. They assume the old objectivist 'picture' view of language, whereby words picture objective realities, i.e., they accurately convey information about things, events, people.

From a literary standpoint, they fail to understand that language is more than an informational tool. Language is also an artistic event. It can be analyzed from the perspective of form and genre, not just from the perspective of content. When studied from the standpoint of artistic expression, words take on an inspirational, even rhetorical meaning. At times, one might even say that the literary purpose dominates, rendering the historical or informational value of texts negligible.

Pastor's Song

Tell me where, where does a fool go, when there's no one left to listen;
To a story without meaning, that nobody wants to hear?
Tell me where, where does a fool go, when there's nothing left to live for;
Tell me where, where does he go from here? (lyrics from Paul Williams, I believe?)

Ever since I heard these lyrics from the movie Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (starring Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges), I have thought it an appropriate dirge for the progressive pastor.

We're stuck with a message that is out of date, boring and irrelevant. Preaching to the pews or to the dead who are in them, is not very inspiring. I'm not sure how I made it this long.

I'm tired of the same old story, rehashing the biblical narrative and trying to find new ways to make it remotely interesting. I wonder what the real Jesus was like!? Would he really understand the church of today, or would he recoil, 'what in the world were you thinking?!'

Healthy Congregations

Peter Steinke's book of the same name makes me chuckle. Seems to me to be oxymoronic. I'm just not sure anymore that institutional religion in any form can ever be healthy again. Everything about the church is anachronistic--it's style, it's buildings, it's nomenclature, its theology, etc. No wonder spiritual people abandon the church. Perhaps the only way to meet Jesus--the real Jesus of history--is to leave the institution that has enslaved him for 2000 years.

FREE JESUS!

Passings

Two passings I note.

The first--my son's transition from the high school life to college life. I'm participating in an orientation session for new students and parents at University of Evansville. College represents the 'peeling back' of yet another layer of youthful innocence. It is a kind of felix culpa. Innocence is an unnatural state, and one from which we must to be weaned. Nevertheless, as all parents know, it is also a painful loss.

The second passing--the death of a good friend, Eunice Glazebrook. I suppose death is the ultimate loss of innocence, it being the full and final elevation from mortality. Or is it? Can we ever be perfect or complete? Will not the next phase of our existence require another process of growth and a corresponding loss of innocence? Is that not the human lot? Self-transcending finitude, as our existentialist friends would say. However, unlike the existentialists, I don't think we are 'beings toward death' (sein zum Tode); I think we are 'beings toward infinity'. We will never reach absolute and perfect self-definition. The process of self-clarification must continue. That's heaven for me--never reaching closure!

New to the Blogosphere

Thank God for typing class in high school! Little did I know then, in the early 1970's, that the computer age was upon us and that keyboarding skills would open a world of discovery for me.

I've been computerized since 1987, when I began to write my dissertation at Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI. But I've never blogged. That opens a new adventure. From it I hope to gain the insights of many other people. Always learning--that's what makes life interesting. That's the only thing that keeps us from dying inside.