Baggas’ Blog

Just upgraded my blog software to Wordpress 2.5. I think I’ve been stuck in 2.1 for quite some time now - for some reason I never bothered to update to the versions in between. Upgrading to 2.5 was pretty quick and painless, and certainly the interface seems much nicer with more powerful editing and management features. And most of my plugins seem to work quite well.

The remainder of this post will be a bit of a test post to try and make sure some things are still working… but read on nonetheless…

To test the YouTube embedding, here’s a video clip from Nickel Creek, one of my favourite bands at the moment, and part of my ongoing journey into bluegrass…

Here’s a quote from one of the books I’m currently reading :

Our life’s dance is not painted for us in footsteps on the floor. It’s not laid out so we know where to place our next step. We simply have to judge which steps best fit the rhythms that we hear.

~ Paul Marshall Heaven is not my Home p62

And the new version has tags. I’ve never previously bothered to use tags on my blog, choosing to stick simply with categories. But since wordpress 2.5 supports it natively, and the rest of the web is going that way, I guess I’ll be tagging my blog posts from now on…

1. At least once every day I shall look steadily up at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things above and about me.

2. Instead of the accustomed idea of a mindless and endless evolutionary change to which we can neither add nor subtract, I shall suppose the universe guided by an Intelligence which, as Aristotle said of Greek drama, requires a beginning, a middle, and an end. I think this will save me from the cynicism expressed by Bertrand Russell before his death when he said: “There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment, and then nothing.”

3. I shall not fall into the falsehood that this day, or any day, is merely another ambiguous and plodding twenty-four hours, but rather a unique event, filled, if I so wish, with worthy potentialities. I shall not be fool enough to suppose that trouble and pain are wholly evil parentheses in my existence, but just as likely ladders to be climbed toward moral and spiritual manhood.

4. I shall not turn my life into a thin, straight line which prefers abstractions to reality. I shall know what I am doing when I abstract, which of course I shall often have to do.

5. I shall not demean my own uniqueness by envy of others. I shall stop boring into myself to discover what psychological or social categories I might belong to. Mostly I shall simply forget about myself and do my work.

6. I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis calls their “divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic” existence.

7. I shall sometimes look back at the freshness of vision I had in childhood and try, at least for a little while, to be, in the words of Lewis Carroll, the “child of the pure unclouded brow, and dreaming eyes of wonder.”

8. I shall follow Darwin’s advice and turn frequently to imaginative things such as good literature and good music, preferably, as Lewis suggests, an old book and timeless music.

9. I shall not allow the devilish onrush of this century to usurp all my energies but will instead, as Charles Williams suggested, “fulfill the moment as the moment.” I shall try to live well just now because the only time that exists is now.

10. Even if I turn out to be wrong, I shall bet my life on the assumption that this world is not idiotic, neither run by an absentee landlord, but that today, this very day, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course I shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the architect who calls himself Alpha and Omega.

~ Clyde Kilby

‘Suppose brethren, a man should make a ring for his betrothed, and she should love the ring more wholeheartedly than the betrothed who made it for her … Certainly, let her love his gift: but, if she should say, “The ring is enough. I do not want to see his face again” what would we say of her? The pledge given her by the betrothed is just that, in his pledge, he himself may be loved. God, then, had given you all these things. Love Him who made them.’

~ St Augustine

Here’s a great quote from Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni relating to recent floods that have troubled this country. I think I get his point but his theology isn’t quite coming out right :

I advise the religious leaders not to pray early for the rain to stop. They will confuse God. I know God is all-knowing but don’t confuse him.  (Sunday Vision - Oct 14, 2007)

My feelings are important for many things. They are essential and valuable. They keep me aware of much that is true and real. But they tell me next to nothing about God or my relation to God. My security comes from who God is, not from how I feel. Discipleship is a decision to live by what I know about God, not by what I feel about him or myself or my neighbours. “As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the LORD is round about his people.” [Ps 125 (MSG)] The image that announces the dependable, unchanging, safe, secure existence of God’s people comes from geology, not psychology.

~ Eugene Peterson A Long Obedience in The Same Direction p87

In matters that are obscure and far beyond our vision, even in such as we may find treated in Holy Scripture, different Interpretations are sometimes possible without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such a case, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search of truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it. That would be to battle not for the teaching of Holy Scripture but for our own, wishing its teaching to conform to ours, whereas we ought to wish ours to conform to that of Sacred Scripture.

~ Saint Augustine (The Literal Meaning of Genesis)

Normally I’m a pretty avid reader, but since returning from Africa I’ve found myself struggling to find time to read. This is for a number of reasons including general busyness, work, the Christmas season, my body clock still being out of sync due to a succession of jet lag plus daylight savings, and a little machine called X-box 360… (more about that another time perhaps) Also contributing may be the fact that the last book I read (Dostoevksy’s The Brothers Karamazov) was a marathon effort, although well worth it.

Anyway, to help get me back into it I’ve turned to a couple of my favourite authors. Patrick O’Brian, with Clarissa Oakes, the 15th in his brilliant Aubrey-Maturin series. And Prayer by Philip Yancey. Yancey is one of my favourite Christian writers - easy to read and accessible yet without being dumbed down (in fact I believe it was Yancey who first led me in the direction of Russian authors such as Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn). His works are always insightful, down to earth and honest, drawing from a diverse range of sources.

In view of trying to lighten my load, I’m not planning to formally review the Prayer book, but I might just randomly post a few quotes from it on here as I read. Here’s a couple of good ones from the first chapter…

Prosperity may dilute prayer too… Christians in developing countries spend less time pondering the effectiveness of prayer and more time actually praying. The wealthy rely on talent and resources to solve immediate problems, and insurance policies and retirement plans to secure the future. We can hardly pray with sincerity, ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ when the pantry is stocked with a month’s supply of provisions. (p7)

life with God should seem more like friendship than duty. (p9)

Grace is opposed to earning, not to effort.

~ Dallas Willard

“I don’t think it is a sin to be rich, it’s a sin to die rich.

I want people to make as much money as they can as long as they give it away as much as they can.”

“The Christian faith grows out of and is sustained by the conversation between the church and its Bible. From this engagement, generation after generation, come the beliefs, the ethics, the liturgy, the purposes, and the relationships that define the Christian faith. To be sure, other voices enter the conversation, invited and uninvited, affecting the language used and the conclusions reached; but the primary and most influential partners are the community and the book. Of course, not all persons in the community are equally engaged in the conversation; some prefer to be silent, and some are silenced. Neither do all the books of the Bible participate equally. The reasons for this unevenness usually lie in the contents of the writings themselves, but not always. Sometimes there is quite a distance between what a document has to say and the church’s willingness or ability to hear it. The Letter to the Hebrews is a case in point.”

~ Fred B. Craddock - Introduction to Hebrews - New Interpreter’s Bible Vol XII : Hebrews - Revelation

 

I’ve been reading a bit of Ecclesiastes recently so this quote from George Orwell I came across today was timely. It’s his transalation of Ecc 9:11 into “modern English”…

I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Now that proves that big words aren’t always best. It’s almost like a complete opposite of The Message - an anti-Message if you like. I’ve noted online, in reading, and in conversation recently quite a bit of antipathy towards The Message. While I accept the reservations about it being one person’s paraphrase, rather than an accurate translation, I still think it can be quite a useful adjunct, to help get a fresh spin on things. You wouldn’t want to use it as your sole version of the Bible though. Personally for me I’ve been combining the NLT and NRSV of late which is a nice mix.

Anyway you can read more about the Orwell quote and the writing principles it illustrates on Steve Addison’s excellent blog World Changers (yet another one to keep an eye on…)

» Orwell on writing Steve Addison’s blog » World Changers

Not sure if I’ve posted this before but it’s a quote I can totally relate to at times, even though I’m not quite 30 yet…

“Up to the age of 30 or beyond it, poetry of many kinds . . . gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare . . . formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also lost any taste for pictures or music . . . I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did . . . My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive . . The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” ~ Charles Darwin

Pride at one’s own humility is one of the last hiding-places of the tempter.

~ Tom Wright : The Scriptures, the Cross & the Power of God p45

How is the King achieving this? How is he delivering his people from their bondage? How is he being God’s agent in the redemption and renewal of Israel and the world? What the crowds could not hear in the cry from the cross was the voice of desolation, of God-forsakenness, wrung from the very soul of one who was being wounded for their transgressions, not his own; bruised for their iniquities, not his own. Upon him was the punishment that brought them peace; with his stripes they were being healed. They, and we with them, were lost sheep without a shepherd: and the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all. And Jesus, in that hour, experienced the darkness and the horror from which he, even he, had shrunk in Gethsemane, from which not only Satan, not only Judas, not only Peter, but also all his natural inclinations, all his love of his own people, had done their best to turn him aside. In identifying totally with the sin of the world, he became cut off from the presence of God. At the very moment when he was most fully embodying the love of God, he found himself totally separated from the love of God, the love which he had known in precious intimacy ever since childhood.

This, then, was the end of the road which he had begun to tread in his baptism by John, the Elijah who had indeed come: identifying with sinners, so that sinners could be saved. This was where it had all led. The road ended not only in the bitterness of apparent failure, not only in the physical torment of a cruel and gruesome death, but in the spiritual darkness of separation from God, bearing upon himself the sins of the world. That is how the world was redeemed: not by Elijah and the Messiah coming and ridding Israel of her political foes, calling down fire to burn up all opposition, but by Jesus, commissioned by John in the spirit and power of Elijah, ridding Israel and the world of her true enemies. Just as Elijah challenged the powers of darkness to that great contest, in which the god who answered by fire was to be God, so now Jesus takes on the rulers of the world: the might of Rome, the law of Israel, and behind both the usurping and destroying power of Satan. And this time the rules of the contest are: the god who answers by love, let him be God.

~ N T Wright - The Crown and the Fire pp44-45 (discussing Matt 27:45-50)

“If you want justice and nothing but justice, you will inevitably get injustice. If you want justice without injustice, you must want love. A world of perfect justice is a world of love. It is a world with no ‘rules,’ in which everyone does what he or she pleases and all are pleased by what everyone does; a world of no ‘rights’ because there are no wrongs from which to be protected; a world of no ‘legitimate entitlements’ because everything is given and nothing withheld; a world with no ‘equality’ because all differences are loved in their own appropriate way; a world in which ‘desert’ plays no role because all actions stem from super-abundant grace…The blindfold would be taken from the eyes of Justitia and she would delight in whatever she saw; she would lay aside the scales because she would not need to weigh and compare anything; she would drop her sword because there would be nothing to police.”

~ Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace
as quoted by Scot McKnight in Embracing Grace p169.

I know it’s 4 days late, but this is a prayer by John Wesley, traditionally recited by Methodists in their New Year’s Eve (”Watch Night”) services. It’s a powerful statement of commitment and dedication and surrender to the will of God, in contrast to our own plans which we usually make at this time of year…

I am no longer my own, but thine.
Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed by thee or laid aside for thee, exalted for thee or brought low for thee.
Let me be full, let me be empty
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.
And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, thou art mine, and I am thine.
So be it.
And the covenant which I have made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven. Amen.

Just a quick book recommendation. Earlier today I finished The Jesus Creed, by Scot McKnight. This is a great book which among other things, emphasises that there is more to Jesus than just his death and resurrection. The story of Jesus’ life, the way he lived and the things he did, are all filled with significance and conform to a singular emphasis of love for God and others - the ‘Jesus Creed.’ I especially valued the final section of the book, where McKnight discusses how various events in Jesus’ life, such as his baptism, temptation, and transfiguration, still have ongoing significance for us today. It’s a very powerful, interesting, and easy to read book and I would heartily recommend it.

The next book I’m tackling is ‘Orthodoxy‘ by G K Chesterton (Gilbert Keith Chesterton) - I wonder if anyone else has spotted the fact that the effeminate restaurant critic on Frasier (one of my favourite shows) has the same name as this classic turn of the century Christian author - Gil Chesterton. I certainly can’t find any link between the two with a quick google.

Anyway the first chapter has already proven to be a unique mix of profound thought with a healthy dose of wit, kind of reminiscent of C.S. Lewis, which I guess is not surprising given that Lewis regarded Chesterton as one of his greatest influences. Here’s a couple of examples :

It is always perilous to the mind to reckon up the mind. A flippant person has asked why we say, “As mad as a hatter.” A more flippany person might answer that a hatter is mad because he has to measure the human head.

For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed forever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox at its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers.

A great quote from Scot McKnight’s book The Jesus Creed :

Our vacation of choice, so I’ve heard, corresponds to our view of heaven. Those who hike into the mountains with their tents to secluded spots seem to think of heaven as a place of solitude and worship. Those who take vacations to big cities or Disney World or to crowded beaches or to tourist locations with groups on tour buses seem to think of heaven as a place of society and worship.

Heaven
Originally uploaded by baggas.

I think if you asked a two year old, heaven might be a place with lots of coloured balls

For about a hundred years we have so concentrated on one of the virtues - ‘kindness’ or mercy - that most of us do not feel anything except kindness to be really good or anything but cruelty to be really bad. Such lopsided ethical developments are not uncommon, and other ages too have had their pet virtues and curious insensibilities. And if one virtue must be cultivated at the expense of all the rest, none has a higher claim than mercy - for every Christian must reject with detestation that covert propaganda for cruelty which tries to drive mercy out of the world by calling it names such as ‘Humanitarianism’ and ‘Sentimentality’. The real trouble is that ‘kindness’ is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that ‘his heart’s in the right place’ and ‘he wouldn’t hurt a fly’, though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is noy so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble.

“Watch your thoughts; they become your words. Watch your words; they become your actions. Watch your actions; they become your habits. Watch your habits; they become your character. Watch your character for it will become your destiny.”

Not sure who Frank is but he’s got a cool name, and I like the quote. By the way, did you notice my new quotation style? It’s done using CSS and a background gif image (which I borrowed from another blog I passed through yesterday) - I think to get serious about web design you really need to get into CSS. I’ve only just scratched the surface of it but it is an incredibly powerful tool.

I was supposed to be going into work early this morning to induce a patient but she was very obliging and had her little baby at quarter to ten last night after a quick uncomplicated labour (a cute tiny little girl), so I have another hour at home right now. It’s less than a month now til my first GP fellowship exam and I’m still feeling very lackadaisical about it. I have an unhealthy combination of poor motivation and overconfidence which is not at all conducive to study. I guess I should work harder at forcing myself to study though - this is possibly the last ever exam I will do (well medical ones anyway) and I would hate for it to be the first ever one I fail. So if I don’t post as much on this blog over the next few weeks, hopefully the reason will be that I have my head buried in a book.

I once had a conversation with Bono, the lead singer for the rock band U2. I wanted to know how he could put together a song entitled “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” since I knew he was a firm believer in Christ.
Bono answered, “Being a Christian hasn’t given me all the answers; instead it’s given me a whole new set of questions.”

~ Tony Campolo “Speaking My Mind” p xii

This quote, from N T Wright, shows why Jesus’ statements offering forgiveness of sins was such a big deal to the Jews of the time. The modern metaphor helps me appreciate it in a way I haven’t done before :

“Jesus acted and spoke as if he was in some sense called to do and be what the Temple was and did. His offer of forgiveness, with no prior condition of Temple-worship or sacrifice, was the equivalent of someone in our world offering as a private individual to issue someone else with a passport or driver’s license. He was undercutting the official system and claiming by implication to be establishing a new one in it’s place.”

~ N. T. Wright - The Challenge of Jesus p65

“Those who put their trust in God will come to understand the truth of his ways. Those who have been faithful will live with him in his love for he is kind and merciful to the ones whom he has chosen.”

“God’s first concern is not what the church does, it is what the church is. Being must always precede doing, for what we do will be according to what we are. To understand the moral character of God’s people is a primary essential in understanding the nature of the church. As Christians we are to be a moral example to the world, reflecting the character of Jesus Christ.”

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.”

Didn’t get a whole lot of sleep last night thanks to having to deliver a baby at 1:20am, and then my own kids decided to wake up half the night thereafter. And this morning I’m off to a seminar in Perth so no time for serious blogging, but I thought I’d leave you with this great quote concerning heaven that I read yesterday evening :

“There we shall rest and see,

we shall see and love,

we shall love and praise.

Behold what will be at the end without end.

For what other end do we have, if not to reach the kingdom which has no end?”

Here’s a quote I read the other day from CS Lewis, which I thought was brilliant. I found it in the front of this new book I’m reading, “The Divine Conspiracy” by Dallas Willard, which promises to be amazing. I’ve posted this quote elsewhere but it’s so good I thought I’d stick it here as well (plus every good Christian blog has to have a C S Lewis quote once in a while… kidding)
It’s from the Screwtape letters so is from the point of view of demons talking about God, who is their enemy (I added the bold) :

And that is where the troughs come in. You must have often wondered why [God] does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs - to carry out from the will alone the duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients [humans] along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with, the better. He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do [God’s] will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

Another quote from Don Miller :

“If there were a lifeboat adrift at sea, and in the lifeboat were a male lawyer, a female doctor, a crippled child, a stay-at-home mom, and a garbageman, and one person had to be thrown overboard to save the others, which person would you choose?”

Actually the reason I posted that quote is because I’d be interested to hear people’s answers to the question. I know which one I’d choose, and why, but what about you?

Donald Miller on his feelings in response to the Sept 11 attacks (from Searching for God Knows What):

“It was a somber time for all of us. Truth got lost in emotion, both for and against the West. I found myself sentimental at first, thinking of firefighters going into the buildings, and then I found myself feeling for Arabs here in the States and abroad. I lost sentimentality about the time country-and-western singers came out of the woodwork to sing twangy and horribly written songs about why America is better than everybody else. It killed me. None of it was true. Then I got sad about it.”

I can relate. I remember the sentimentality dropped for me when that awful American telethon came on, with terrible music and asking us here in Australia to donate money to well off Americans (now in the aftermath of the Tsunami it seems even more incongruous) - but they were emotive times…

“No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. If no one turned around when we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met ‘cut us dead’, and acted as if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would before long well up in us, from which the cruellest bodily torture would be a relief.”

White egg yolks it seems. A Japanese company are now producing eggs with white yolk instead of yellow. Now that’s just too weird for me.