Another good installment in the 43 Old Cemetery Road series, continuing the tradition of cute macabre humor and epistolary storytelling. Read the installments in order for best effect.
We got this before it was officially out. Carol Stream Library rocks!
From the 33 1/3 series. Good introduction to the Elephant 6 people and their creative process. Everybody but Jeff Mangum.
Quotes:
I know that it was really scary for him—as it is for everybody—sharing things with the outside world, when the things that you’re sharing are almost the whole of your insides, the thing without which there’d be no purpose to you.
After their set, a friend told them he’d had to go outside and walk around for a long time, because the experience was so emotionally overwhelming.
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is one of the fuzziest records ever made, and yet it is completely lacking in over-the-counter fuzz effects.
Microphone distortion is an artificial device you can use in the studio as a production and engineering choice, to simulate the energetic sound that you’re trying to get. It’s there, the people are playing it—how do you catch it on tape? You do certain artificial things to capture it.
When he first heard Jeff sing “I love you Jesus Christ,” he didn’t know how to take it. As someone who’d always had problems with organized religion, he was repelled. But as a songwriter, he was stunned by the profound and fearless honesty with which Jeff was expressing his faith. Jeff didn’t seem to give a damn what anyone thought of him, or if he seemed uncool. And it’s this naked honesty, Martyn thinks, that has brought so many people to the record—even folks who aren’t themselves religious are touched by Jeff’s faith and his guts.
there’s this extra quality of rawness and reality. It’s listening in to people’s lives, and when you capture that it resonates for people who hear it.
In the years following Aeroplane, Jeff began exploring his spiritual interests, reading Krishnamurti, traveling, spending time in a monastery and, as Laura saw it, becoming a more calm and centered person.
Good traditional Pinkwater madness. Read with Laura.
Quotes:
State Twenty-Six
Klugarsh Mind Control
Yojimbo's Japanese-English Dictionary
Atlantis, Lemuria and Waka-Waka
Funny and poignant, a normal guy's attempt to tackle the whole Bible in one year.
Quotes:
As I read, I type into my PowerBook every rule, every guideline, every suggestion, every nugget of advice I find in the Bible. When I finish, I have a very long list. It runs seventy-two pages. More than seven hundred rules. The scope is astounding. All aspects of my life will be affected—the way I talk, walk, eat, bathe, dress, and hug my wife.
“You just have to tell them that you have a hunger and a thirst. And you may not sit at the same banquet table as them, but you have a hunger and thirst. So they shouldn’t judge you.” I love the way he talks. By the end, perhaps I’ll be able to speak in majestic food metaphors like Reverend Richards.
Inspired by my ex-uncle Gil, I had purchased some tassels from a website called “Tassels without Hassles.”
Inspired by my ex-uncle Gil, I had purchased some tassels from a website called “Tassels without Hassles.” They look like the kind of tassels on the corners of my grandmother’s needlepoint pillows.
When it comes to the Bible, there is always—but always—some level of interpretation, even on the most seemingly basic rules.
There is an upside to the Bible’s infertility motif: The harder it was for a woman to get pregnant, the greater was the resulting child.
I’ve rarely said the word Lord, unless it’s followed by of the Rings. I don’t often say God without preceding it with Oh my.
The prohibition against mixing wool and linen comes right after the command to love your neighbor. It’s not like the Bible has a section called “And Now for Some Crazy Laws.” They’re all jumbled up like a chopped salad.
The strictest Sabbath keepers today are probably the Orthodox Jews. In postbiblical times, the rabbis wrote down a complex list of forbidden behavior. It’s got thirty-nine types of work, including cooking, combing, and washing. You can’t plant, so gardening is off-limits. You can’t tear anything, so toilet paper must be pre-ripped earlier in the week. You can’t make words, so Scrabble is often considered off-limits (though at least one rabbi allows Deluxe Scrabble, since the squares have ridges, which provides enough separation between letters so that they don’t actually form words).
The Hebrew scriptures prescribe a tremendous amount of capital punishment. Think Saudi Arabia, multiply by Texas, then triple that.
He is serious. This isn’t a cutesy grumpy old man. This is an angry old man. This is a man with seven decades of hostility behind him.
The Bible is right: A deluge of images does encourage idolatry. Look at the cults of personality in America today. Look at Hollywood. Look at Washington. I’d like to see the next presidential race be run according to Second Commandment principles. No commercials. A radio-only debate. We need an ugly president. I know we’re missing out on some potential Abe Lincolns because they’d look gawky and gangly on TV.
The outer affects the inner. Behavior shapes your psyche as much as the other way around.
This is what the Sabbath should feel like. A pause. Not just a minor pause, but a major pause. Not just a lowering of the volume, but a muting. As the famous rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, the Sabbath is a sanctuary in time. At about 1:30 I hear Julie come home. I call out
This is what the Sabbath should feel like. A pause. Not just a minor pause, but a major pause. Not just a lowering of the volume, but a muting. As the famous rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, the Sabbath is a sanctuary in time.
I still can’t wrap my brain around the notion that God would change His mind because we ask Him to. And yet I still love these prayers. To me they’re moral weight training.
The point is, I don’t see the world as a collection of soulless quarks and neutrinos. At times—not all the time, but sometimes—the entire world takes on a glow of sacredness, like someone has flipped on a unfathomably huge halogen lamp and made the universe softer, fuller, less menacing.
When will it sink into my skull that there is no such thing as an obscure Bible verse?
The Tiffany of ten-string harps is an Indiana-based shop called Jubilee Harps. (Motto: “Home is where your harp is!”)
a white-haired man near Rockefeller Center started yelling at me. “A ten-string harp? The Bible actually says an eight-string harp, not a ten-string harp!” He could have been playing with my mind, or he could have been your garden-variety crazy, hard to tell.
I used to order kosher meals on airplanes because someone told me that they were better—the reasoning was that the airlines have to give the kosher meals special attention and can’t throw them in the vat with everyone else’s slop.
That’s the paradox: I thought religion would make me live with my head in the clouds, but as often as not, it grounds me in this world.
I found a tremendously disturbing Food and Drug Administration website that lists the “natural and unavoidable” amounts of insects for every kind of food. One hundred grams of pizza sauce can have up to thirty insect eggs. One hundred grams of drained mushrooms may contain twenty or more maggots. And if you want oregano on your mushroom pizza, you’ll be enjoying 1,250 or more insect fragments per 10 grams.
My only other brush with tefillin was a book I was sent a few years ago at Esquire. It was by Leonard Nimoy—Star Trek’s Spock himself—who, as it turns out, is also a photographer and a quasireligious Jew. His book contained racy black-and-white photography of half-nude women wrapped in tefillin, a sort of Mapplethorpe-meets-Talmud motif. (Brief but relevant side note: You know Spock’s famous split-fingered “Live long and prosper” salute? It’s actually a sacred hand position used by the Jewish priestly class, the kohanim.)
Here, at the halfway mark of my journey, I’ve had an unexpected mental shift. I feel closer to the ultrareligious New Yorkers than I do the secular. The guy with the fish on his bumper sticker. The black man with the kufi. The Hasidim with their swinging fringes. These are my compatriots. They think about God and faith and prayer all the time, just like I do.
Stop looking at the Bible as a self-help book.
My quest is a paradoxical one. I’m trying to fly solo on a route that was specifically designed for a crowd.
Before I leave, I ask the obvious question: What do the Samaritans think about the parable of Good Samaritan? Well, not surprisingly, they don’t object. They like it. There is even a Samaritan-owned Good Samaritan Coffee Shop in the West Bank. Benyamim tells me he has given Jesus’s parable a lot of thought and has his own take on it: It was autobiographical. Benyamim believes that the wounded man is meant to represent Jesus himself.
And then I am hit with a realization. And hit is the right word—it felt like a punch to my stomach. Here I am being prideful about creating an article in a midsize American magazine. But God—if He exists—He created the world. He created flamingos and supernovas and geysers and beetles and the stones for these steps I’m sitting on. “Praise the Lord,” I say out loud.
These people have perfected the art of ignoring the homeless. Their body language is very clear: “I am unable to look up for even a second because I am so deeply involved in observing this discarded Tropicana pineapple juice carton on the track.” It’s heartbreaking.
The law of fair weights and measures appears an impressive six times in the Bible. By way of comparison, the passages often cited to condemn homosexuality: also six.
Passover. If you’re even remotely Jewish, you know it as the religiously themed, springtime version of Thanksgiving.
Passover. If you’re even remotely Jewish, you know it as the religiously themed, springtime version of Thanksgiving. And if you’re Christian, you probably know it, at the very least, as the meal that Jesus was eating at the Last Supper.
I’ve learned that men of my vintage aren’t having a whole lot of sex. I think I’m hanging out with too many new fathers.
I could adopt the cognitive-dissonance strategy: If I act like Jesus is God, eventually maybe I will start to believe that Jesus is God. That’s been my tactic with the God of the Hebrew Bible, and it’s actually started to work.
That’s the big secret: The radical wing of the Christian right is a lot more boring than its liberal detractors would have you believe.
I hope Ralph’s right. I hope the Bible doesn’t endorse gay bashing.
I call Greenberg. He has plenty to say about the Bible and homosexuality. But the point I find most fascinating is this: God and humans are partners in a quest to reveal new meanings of the Bible. The letters of the Bible are eternal, but not its interpretation.
There are always two active parties. We must have reverence and awe for God, and honor for the chain of tradition. But that doesn’t mean we can’t use new information to help us read the holy texts in new ways.
It’s an odd way to live. But also kind of great and powerful. I’ve never before been so aware of the thousands of little good things, the thousands of things that go right every day.
I keep a record of wrongs. It’s in my Palm Treo in a file I’ve labeled “Stuff.”
The Catholic and Lutheran services I’ve been to have been like well-orchestrated Bach concertos. This is like Ornette Coleman free jazz. All spontaneous.
I snap myself out of it. It was too much. How could I come back to New York and tell Julie I was saved at a serpent-handling church in Tennessee? I force myself back down. I’m not ready to surrender yet.
The only genuine-ish biblical robe that didn’t cost several hundred dollars was at a Halloween costume store. There it was, next to the Roman emperor togas: a shepherd’s robe.
“Let me drop an atom bomb on you,” said this Karaite; his name is Nehemiah Gordon, and he runs the Karaite website, the Karaite Korner. “You can’t follow all of the Bible literally because we can’t know what some of the words mean.”
The Bible may have not been dictated by God, it may have had a messy and complicated birth, one filled with political agendas and outdated ideas—but that doesn’t mean the Bible can’t be beautiful and sacred.
If you try to literally follow Leviticus 19:18—“You shall love your neighbor as yourself”—well, you can’t.
“C. S. Lewis said the distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuthhounds conceive.” In short, pretending to be better than you are is better than nothing.
As you probably know, the most important part of a modern bar or bat mitzvah isn’t the Torah portion or lighting the candles, it’s the theme. You’ve got to have a theme: sports, Camelot, whatever.
So at this suburban Jersey country club, my son’s hands locked around my neck, his head pressed against my shoulder, I chose to accept this feeling and ride it to the end. To surrender. If I had to label it, I’d say the feeling is part love, part gratefulness, part connectedness, part joy.
Driving back to New York, I ask myself, why did that just happen? Did it have something to do with my frazzled state after Nancy’s death? Maybe. Was it because my project is about to end, and I forced myself into the state? Yeah, probably. But even if it was manufactured, it was still real.
The year showed me beyond a doubt that everyone practices cafeteria religion. It’s not just moderates. Fundamentalists do it too.
But the more important lesson was this: there’s nothing wrong with choosing. Cafeterias aren’t bad per se. I’ve had some great meals at cafeterias. I’ve also had some turkey tetrazzini that gave me the dry heaves for sixteen hours. The key is in choosing the right dishes. You need to pick the nurturing ones (compassion), the healthy ones (love thy neighbor), not the bitter ones. Religious leaders don’t know everything about every food, but maybe the good ones can guide you to what is fresh. They can be like a helpful lunch lady who—OK, I’ve taken the metaphor too far.
The first is from the pastor out to pasture, Elton Richards. Here’s his metaphor: Try thinking of the Bible as a snapshot of something divine. It may not be a perfect picture. It may have flaws: a thumb on the lens, faded colors in the corners. But it still helps to visualize.
My daughter Laura has discovered Jules Verne. We read together (separately), Journey to the Centre of the Earth, now Around the World in 80 Days and we're getting started on 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea(s). I've read all this in Brazil, in Portuguese, when i was about her age, borrowing each green-leather bound book from my Grandfather Gustavo's collection. They are great books, exciting and rewarding.
Quotes:
“Monsieur is going to leave home?” “Yes,” returned Phileas Fogg. “We are going round the world.”
Phileas Fogg, who was not travelling, but only describing a circumference,
In the way this strange gentleman was going on, he would leave the world without having done any good to himself or anybody else.
“Why, you are a man of heart!” “Sometimes,” replied Phileas Fogg, quietly; “when I have the time.”
“The valves are not sufficiently charged!” he exclaimed. “We are not going. Oh, these English! If this was an American craft, we should blow up, perhaps, but we should at all events go faster!”
If anyone, at this moment, had entered the Custom House, he would have found Mr. Fogg seated, motionless, calm, and without apparent anger, upon a wooden bench.
Phileas Fogg was free! He walked to the detective, looked him steadily in the face, and with the only rapid motion he had ever made in his life, or which he ever would make, drew back his arms, and with the precision of a machine knocked Fix down.
Chapter XXXVII: In Which It Is Shown That Phileas Fogg Gained Nothing By His Tour Around The World, Unless It Were Happiness
Sometimes i hate it when i finish reading a truly awesome book... i'll miss this one. Will probably have to read it again. I believe at the end of the year we will still be saying that this is one of the most important books of 2012. Go Diana, go! You rock.
Quotes:
Strange as it may seem in this time of cultural anxiety, economic near collapse, terrorist fear, political violence, environmental crisis, and partisan anger, I believe that the United States (and not only the United States) is caught up in the throes of a spiritual awakening, a period of sustained religious and political transformation during which our ways of seeing the world, understanding ourselves, and expressing faith are being, to borrow a phrase, “born again.”
Ellen is still reaching for connection. Even after leaving the church, she attempts to create some sort of new faith community through books, the Internet, charity, and her workplace.
there are four American Gods: the Authoritarian God (31 percent of the population), the Benevolent God (23 percent), the Critical God (16 percent), and the Distant God (24 percent).
American churches were organized on the same principles and structures as were twentieth-century American corporations.
However, in a roundabout way, their criticism actually demonstrates authentic spiritual longing. Somewhere these young adults have evidently heard that Christianity is supposed to be a religion about love, forgiveness, and practicing what Jesus preached and that faith should give meaning to real life. They are judging Christianity on its own teachings and believe that American churches come up short. Thus, their discontent about what is may reflect a deeper longing for a better sort of Christianity, one that embodies Jesus’s teaching and life in a way that makes a real difference in the world.
Insofar as religion was guardian, pastor, and priest of the old order, it will have to give way and is already doing so. Western Christendom has ended; a “Christian America” survives as mythic memory and political slogan.
No matter how fractious, wounded, irksome, hypocritical, or potentially destructive it can be, religion makes a difference, especially in the lives of the disadvantaged, the oppressed, and the poor.
The awakening going on around us is not an evangelical revival; it is not returning to the faith of our fathers or re-creating our grandparents’ church. Instead, it is a Great Returning to ancient understandings of the human quest for the divine.
As a pastor asked me, “Can we stop reciting the creed now? I’m tired of it driving people away from church.”
During the last few centuries, to ask “What do you believe?” in the religious realm was to demand intellectual answers about things that cannot be comprehended entirely by the mind. Thus masked as objective truth, religion increasingly became a matter of opinion, personal taste, individual interpretation, and wishful thinking.
People became quite militant about the answers they liked the best. The what questions often divided families and neighbors into rival churches, started theological quarrels, initiated inquisitions, fueled political and social conflict, and led, on occasion, to one losing one’s head.
SPIRITUAL QUESTION I: How Do I Believe?
SPIRITUAL QUESTION 2: Who Do I Believe?
when we insert ourselves as the ones who must trust, the tone changes and the Apostles’ Creed takes on the quality of a prayer. Instead of factual certainty, the creed evokes humility, hope, and a bit of faithful supplication.
Notice that when we insert ourselves as the ones who must trust, the tone changes and the Apostles’ Creed takes on the quality of a prayer. Instead of factual certainty, the creed evokes humility, hope, and a bit of faithful supplication. It moves the action of the creed from the brain to the heart. Changing a single word, “believe,” to its original sense of “trust” transforms the text from a statement of dogma to an experience of God.
Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, pointed out in a recent book that the Christian creeds are similar to the Three Jewels of Buddhism, the vows that shape a Buddhist way of life: “I take refuge in the Buddha; I take refuge in the Dharma (Teaching); I take refuge in Sangha (Community).”
The Religious Question: How Do I Do That?
Increasingly, as the church was externally defined as a national entity and a corporation, learning how meant being trained in how to: the professional and programmatic techniques to become an expert.
SPIRITUAL QUESTION 1: What Do I Do? The Art of Intention
From a historical perspective, borrowing simply means that conventional religious institutions—marked by “us” versus “them” attitudes—do not have adequate resources to respond to contemporary questions.
SPIRITUAL QUESTION 2: Why Do I Do It? The Art of Imitation
The primary why for any Christian practice is that the action, in some way, imitates Jesus.
The ultimate model for programmatic church was Willow Creek Community Church, located north of Chicago.
Spiritual practices are more like crafts than programs.
The path to Christian sainthood may not be as mystical as is often thought—it may be a matter of putting in the time to practice.
We are to be learners on the way, then initiates, apprentices, skilled practitioners, and masters. Not just members of a church.
SPIRITUAL QUESTION I: Where Am I?
the question “Who am I?” and its emerging answer, “I am my journey,” appear to be new contours shaping our sense of selfhood. In the twenty-first century, it may be better to ask “Where am I?” as a path toward understanding who I am.
SPIRITUAL QUESTION 2: Whose Am I?
This, I suspect, is the root of many people’s anxiety about church—that religion is the purveyor of a sort of salvation that does not address their lived struggles.
As a movement preposition, “through” reminds us that we are not static. Through God new possibilities open for growth as we move beyond our perceived limitations to new strengths, insights, and compassion.
And the reverse question is equally helpful: “Who is God through me?” What does God actually look like to others when I enact God’s love and justice in the world?
“Just putting a bunch of people together in a church building doesn’t make them a community. Community is about relationships and making connections. That’s spiritual work. And it may or may not happen in a church.”
Other than joining a political party, it is hard to think of any other sort of community that people join by agreeing to a set of principles.
Long ago, before the last half millennium, Christians understood that faith was a matter of community first, practices second, and belief as a result of the first two. Our immediate ancestors reversed the order. Now, it is up to us to restore the original order.
Jesus did not walk by the Sea of Galilee and shout to fishermen, “Have faith!” Instead, he asked them to do something: “Follow me.” When they followed, he gave them more
Jesus did not walk by the Sea of Galilee and shout to fishermen, “Have faith!” Instead, he asked them to do something: “Follow me.” When they followed, he gave them more things to do. At first, he demonstrated what he wanted them to do. Then he did it with them. Finally, he sent them out to do it themselves,
They discovered that proclaiming the kingdom was not a matter of teaching doctrine; rather, the kingdom was a matter of imitating Jesus’s actions.
It may seem as if religion is on a trajectory of unstoppable change, but genuine spiritual change does not result from historical determinism. Spiritual awakening is not ultimately the work of invisible cultural forces. Instead, it is the work of learning to see differently, of prayer, and of conversion. It is something people do.
Anxiety is frequently the mark of personal transformation, for anxiety is a primary emotion when the heart feels disoriented and lost.
Awakening is not a miracle we receive; it is actually something we can do.
What do you do to participate in awakening? To rouse others? To move to spread the good news of a new spiritual awakening? Perform faith. Display the kingdom in all that you do. Anticipate the reign of God in spiritual practices. Act up and act out for God’s love.
Awakening cannot occur without laughter and lightness.
Churches cannot be clubs for the righteous, institutions that maintain religious conformity in the face of change, or businesses that manage orthodoxy and personal piety. Churches must be more like Rolling Thunder or holy flash mobs. They must grasp—in a profound and authentic way—that they are sacred communities of performance where the faithful learn the script of God’s story, rehearse the reign of God, experience delight, surprise, and wonder, and participate fully in the play.
There is no specific technique that can be employed, no set program to follow to start a great awakening. If you want it to happen, you just have to do it. You have to perform its wisdom, live into its hope, and “act as if” the awakening is fully realized. And you have to do it with others in actions of mutual creation.
prepare by reading and learning the holy texts of faith in new ways.
engage two new practices of faith. One should be an inner practice, such as prayer, yoga, or meditation, and the other, an outward practice, such as offering hospitality to the homeless or learning to be a storyteller.
have fun.
These are hard times, worrisome times, and serious times. Try to enjoy the life you have and play along the way.
participate in making change.
This awakening will not be the last in human history, but it is our awakening. It is up to us to move with the Spirit instead of against it, to participate in making our world more humane, just, and loving.
A previously unpublished novella by a young Kurt Vonnegut, not as good as his best, but already showing off how great a writer he was.
Quotes:
In an eon came evening, to cool, and to displace the sounds of daytime with whispers and croaks and sounds like rusty hinges from grass-tuft sanctuaries in woods and pastures, and from lily pads a quarter of a mile away.
You’re evidently going to have to learn the hard way that your happiness for the rest of your lives depends on how well you fit yourselves into other people’s plans, not vice versa; and on how willing you are to submit to the judgment of someone who knows more than you do.
A surprisingly good book, a reflection on dog training as spiritual practice, and living grace.
Quotes:
Plenty in Life is Free,
she makes a clear case for replacing the “Nothing in Life is Free” training mindset with an approach that creates something else Kathy and I have had conversations about—an emotionally intact animal.
It turns out that my concerns with NILIF have at least as much to do with my own spirituality and personal view of relationships as with the pros and cons of NILIF as a training regimen.
Life has a way of revealing falsehoods, mostly, I believe, through suffering. It causes disillusionment, literally. Illusions get shattered.
Major General Geoffrey Miller, who was in charge at Guantanamo Bay, visited her in Baghdad and said, ‘At Guantanamo Bay, we learned that the prisoners have to earn every single thing they have. He said they are like dogs and if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog, you’ve lost control.’”
The whole paradigm of physical dominance needs to go.
In the long run, communication trumps control.
When working with extremely challenging dogs, I’m occasionally tempted to distill my training advice to, “Reward any behaviors the dog does except the three you consider most annoying.”
I suggest our new paradigm could be about exchanging reinforcers: your dog gives you reinforcers (in the form of good behavior) and you give reinforcers to your dog, back-and-forth in a continuous flow.
“Reinforce behaviors you like; prevent reinforcement for behaviors you dislike.”
make sure you’re creating a “to do” list of behaviors, rather than a “don’t do” list.
Just consider that perfection is vastly overrated. You can safely let some things slide.
most pet dogs experience life as a series of relatively mundane stretches of time punctuated by Big Thrills.
Dog Training as Spiritual Practice
quote by Nelson Mandela in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom: “A leader is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.”
Each morning that I wake to see my two old dogs eager to begin another day’s adventures, I say aloud, “Thank you God for one more day with my companions.” And I’m reminded that this word, so descriptive of their role in my life, translates literally to “bread fellows.”
This, though, runs the risk of messing up the sacrosanct hierarchy of “human dominates/outranks dog.” Good. Out with this dogma! Give up your devotion to hierarchiology (a great term coined by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book, The Peter Principle). Consider rank (hierarchy) rank (stale and smelly).
So, above all but nutrition and shelter, dogs need translators—cultural liaisons and advocates to help them make sense of the mystery of living with humans.
Besides, the world surely doesn’t need another dictator, benign or otherwise. But it never has enough lovers.
I gladly relinquish the chance to have Stepford dogs—mindlessly obedient and lacking humor—in exchange for the vibrant, silly, somewhat unpredictable dogs by my side.
