August 29, 2009 by djackson.

A recent newspaper article speaks of “the singularity,” a term popularized by science fiction writer and real-life scientist Vernor Vinge to describe the moment when humans create machines smarter than we are and thus engineer our own demise - or at least subservience. Some scientists take this notion quite seriously, positing rogue warriors and self-replicating robots. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/science/26robot.html)

And I can’t even program my cell phone. I’ll go down in the first wave. The writer asks what it would be like “to relate to a machine that is as intelligent as your spouse?” A step down from handling the microwave, my wife would probably reply.

Still, the whole thing gets me to wondering about the current state of technology as it relates to our spiritual life. When I was a kid, one guy in our (very large) church had a phone in his car. The phone was a boat-anchor and the car was a Caddy, facts which frame two conditions of such devices back in those days: the machinery was clunky and the machinery was for rich people. Now, for a fraction of what that device ran, the lower-middle classes can purchase prepaid cell phones that also take pictures and send text messages. Democracy in action? Perhaps.

But writer Bruce Sterling flung out an observation at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin last spring that deserves consideration: “Poor folk,” he quipped, “love their cell phones.” Behind that provocative dicho lurks the notion that if you’re rich enough you can shut down the Blackberry if you feel like it. The rest of us, fighting to hang onto the jobs we have and perhaps trade up to the ones we (think we) want, must stamp out the characters of constant connectivity, Facebooking and Tweeting and Skyping our fingers (or thumbs, at least) to the bone. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19wwln-medium-t.html)

It makes me wonder where our spiritual practices fit into all of this. In the opening lecture of my spiritual formation class this week I gave the students my standard spiel about no cell phones or pagers. After class a student explained that his Blackberry now holds his Bible(s) - multiple translations - and that if he shuts it off, he bans the books and the parchments from the classroom experience.

So I’m interested to find out: How does modern technology fit into your spiritual life? Do you shut down the grid to tune into God? Or have you discovered ways for cyberspace to serve spiritual activity? One free volume of Spurgeon’s sermons (old-school: actual pages between hard covers) to the best response.

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August 22, 2009 by djackson.

“Summer’s almost over. Soon it’s back to school.
Soon they’ll drain the water out of the swimming pool.
Adopt a brand new attitude, a positive outlook.
Buy yourself some pencils and a loose-leaf notebook.”

- “Summer’s Almost Over” by Louden Wainwright III

Yes, he’s the same guy who wrote “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road,” but I’m in a more contemplative mood this morning. Summer is, in fact, drawing to a close. I have summers now, by the way, now that I’m a professor. As a pastor I didn’t have them. Oh, June, July and August still reported for duty, but no seasonal shift marked the transition, no change in schedule differentiated the days. Historians to this day do not know which stream is the Rubicon; it was such an insignificant trickle that nobody marked it on the map. What made it important was that Caesar crossed it. In my pastoral days a similar brook might have separated one season from the next but I had no time to stop and notice. The full-out blitz of chronos pushed me past any dividing line of kairos before I had sufficient leisure to be aware.

Not so in my current incarnation, where academic life breathes in and breathes out on a regular basis. We don’t shut down for the dog days here at the South Texas School of Christian Studies. Office hours remain as posted and we stand our watches as faithfully as ever. But it is a different time, a different season. No students, of course: classes met in one-week intensives very early in June and right at the end of August but nothing in between. Also, our president graciously allows each faculty member an additional afternoon off during this time. And we do different things - a little more long-range planning, additional attention to institutional life and overall vision, a little more sowing, a little less reaping and gathering into barns.

Still, classes begin next Tuesday. Wainwright’s lyric sounds the clarion call: I don’t actually use loose leaf notebooks much anymore and prefer my calligraphy pen to a Dixon Tyconderoga #2, but the point’s the same.

Summer’s almost over. A new season’s coming up.
Time to gird your loins and don your jockstrap and your cup.
The hiatus is ended. The lax living has to stop.
Get rid of that beer belly. Do wind sprints till you drop.

- “Summer’s Almost Over” by Louden Wainwright III/blockquote>

Well no, not that, God be praised. Whenever, this summer, I’ve felt wistful about my advancing age (I’ll put another zero on the odometer before the spring semester ends), I’ve caught myself driving by a sun-bombed high school football field, gazing at the seven-man blocking sled like John McCain pondering the Hanoi Hilton and thanking God that youth is fleeting. Still, there is a sort of mental and spiritual “girding up,” a 1 Peter 1.13 kind of thing taking place. And let me say quickly that I like this change. I find myself waking up in the morning with lines for a lecture coursing through my mind.

Yet, teetering here on the apex of the roller-coaster track, poised on the tipping point of classes beginning and the Labor Day holiday, waiting to plunge forward into the adrenaline-splattered rush of it all, I thought it would be a good idea - at least that, if not a spiritual discipline and an act of worship - to pause long enough to ponder what the summer looked like, what it taught me, and what I take forward from here.

Stephen Scaer has written a delightful poem called “Time Management” that seems to fit my mood:

Luther in the year he spent
as Junker Joerg in Wartburg towers,
translated the New Testament
to pass the everlasting hours.

Though living as a refugee
Erasmus wrote his tour de force.
In Praise of Folly’s said to be
the product of a trip by horse.

With dinners late, D’Aguesseau saw
an opportunity to write
his sixteen-volume work of law
in fifteen minutes every night.

Today I slept late, took a walk,
sipped my coffee on my ragged lawn,
checked the mailbox, saw the clock,
and noticed half my life was gone.

Well, yes, and I’m sure Scaer’s humility is admirable and quite genuine. But I’m not so sure that a late morning, a long walk, and coffee with the dandelions is an unworthy way to mark one’s halfway point. At least I hope not, because my summer didn’t include major works of theology, law, or literature. Well, no more stalling; here’s the tab:

1. Travel: I went to Houston with my wife to visit our older son and his fiance, and Becky’s parents. We spent a couple of days in Brownwood with my folks as well, both of us taking individual time with good friends who live there and capping the whole thing with a fairly hilarious dinner on our last night. I even made a solo pilgrimage to Winedale, Texas to watch “Much Ado About Nothing” and “Richard III” performed by student actors in a barn so old you could still see the adze marks where some pioneer squared the logs. And last weekend an hegira to Dallas with my younger son to see our Boston Red Sox drop one to the Rangers in the Ballpark at Arlington. For someone who has always agreed with G. K. Chesterton that, of the two ways of getting back home the first is never to leave, I think this is a respectable record.

2. Exercise: My gym membership at the university expired and, not feeling like forking over forty-five bucks for the second summer session, I decided to start running again. I stopped a couple of years back when my body reached some kind of burnout and I’ve come to miss it. So I bought new shoes (twice what the gym pass would have run me!) and began with rather pitiful half-mile trots along the hiking trail here on our island. This morning I did three miles along the bay front and felt good at the end. I’ve renewed the membership at the fitness center and started integrating resistance training with my runs again. It’s all about Ecclesiastes 7.18.

3. Reading: I rediscovered Frederick Buechner’s Book of Beb this summer, a series I haven’t read since my initial encounter some five or six years ago now. It was like slipping on an old, comfortable pair of shoes after a work week spent in wing tips. Before that, I had remembered out of the blue (or dare I say “been reminded;” I’ll leave the subject of that passive verb purposefully vague) of an old favorite from my junior high days, Sinbad and Me by Kin Platt. An old pair of shoes? This was more like a time machine that put me back in the tennis shoes of a carefree kid with hours of time and miles of unfenced imagination in an Arizona summer long past. I recalled suddenly that it was this book that had first planted in me the lifelong ambition (as yet unfulfilled) to own an English bulldog.

4. Hobbies: Scanning a theological journal as I prepped for a fall course, I came across an article about a Japanese girl, stricken with cancer after Hiroshima, who set out to make one thousand origami cranes because tradition held that such an offering would bring peace to the world. It didn’t, and I still don’t think it will, but I somehow conceived a desire to try it for myself - one thousand prayers for the peace that will come only with the final realization of Christ’s kingdom, and will come today in my world only to the extent that I open myself to my Lord’s ancient prayer, “Thy kingdom come.” I’m up to seventy-seven of ‘em, enjoying myself immensely. I’ve sent some to friends and Becky has begun converting them into mobiles that hang from our ceiling. I’ve even figured out how to customize them because I know which part of the paper will end up being which part of the bird and so can put pictures or text where I choose. On the downside, I haven’t gotten as far as I’d like in my goal to teach myself the harmonica, but I’ll keep plugging away.

5. Mental exercise: When I started running, I decided I would use the time to memorize my favorites among Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues. I’ve puffed down the path along the beaches of Ward Island with slips of sweaty paper in my hands, my feet slapping the surface in rhythm to the words I chant: “That’s my last duchess painted on the wall/Looking as if she were alive. I call . . . .” When I began I had only a few lines of a single piece, and could barely run far enough to recite that. This morning I strode my way through “My Last Duchess,” “The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” “The Laboratory” and, just for good measure, the “Prologue” to Shakespeare’s Henry V.

Summer’s almost over, fading like a tan.
Vacation time is running out like an unplugged fan.
Labor Day is coming. Wet the old grindstone.
For all those lazy, hazy, crazy days you must atone.

- “Summer’s Almost Over” by Louden Wainwright III

But perhaps that’s the wrong verb. “Atone”? No; first of all because, if any of these was a sinful use of my time, One much better qualified than I has made atonement already. And second because I can’t feel any of these was a sin - an enjoyment yes, but not a luxury; not plunder, though clearly a gift. Atonement? No! Thanksgiving. And I offer it heartily, for what lies behind, and what lies ahead.

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August 19, 2009 by djackson.

Not long ago I came upon the story of Sadako Sasaki and the thousand paper cranes. You can read about it athttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadako_Sasaki. I also read of a hospice chaplain in a children’s hospital who made a crane for every one of his terminal patients, telling them the story. I liked the idea and decided to launch my own project to craft 1K origami cranes. Will a thousand paper sculptures bring about world peace? No. But they can be a thousand prayers to the Prince of Peace for his kingdom finally and fully to come. But now I have to figure out what to do with all of these folded marvels piling up around the house! So . . . I have a free, custom-made paper crane for each of the first ten people to send me a mailing address and your favorite quote about peace. I will script your quote onto the right wing of your bird. On the left wing I will write the Koine Greek term for “peace” and the number of that crane in the series. Quotes must be of reasonable length; I’m not caligraphing the Desiderata! If you have a particular piece of paper you want used, send it to me; just bear in mind that I have to cut it into a square in order to make the bird. See the photos above for examples of some of the cranes made so far. From left to right: “Shalom” in Hebrew characters, John 15.27 in Greek, and “Peace” in English, Greek, Latin, Spanish and Hebrew.

Send requests to: djackson@stscs.org or send me a message on Facebook. Snail-mail is 7000 Ocean Drive, Corpus Christi, TX 78412.

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August 13, 2009 by djackson.

Phantosmia: an illusory sense of smell. It means that your nose hallucinates. Psychotics hear voices that aren’t there; phantosmiacs sniff scents that don’t exist. Or at least, scents that aren’t around any longer.

Often associated with psychological disorders such as schizophrenia, or physical maladies such as epilepsy, phantosmia can also occur in otherwise completely healthy people. Scientists don’t understand it all that well. Apparently the brain, which likes smells, thinks things have gotten too tame in the old olfactory and starts yanking some golden oldies off the shelves, going into reruns if you will. The problem here is that what comes most readily to mind are the strongest - as opposed to the most pleasant - aromas. Hence the sufferer more often noses the napalm of manure than the perfume of petunias.

Phantosmiac Jane G. Andrews, who has suffered from the condition for years, says it well in a recent article in the New York Times: “There’s nothing plainer than the nose on my face, but nothing more mysterious, either.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/health/11cases.html?_r=1&ref=views)

Smell may be the most intimate of the senses. As I understand it, the physical process involves microscopic bits of the thing you’re smelling actually wafting up the old nostrils and settling into waiting receptors. Scent, if this is correct, consists of internal physical contact with the source. Philosopher Martin Buber sees the force of this when he dismisses the usual formulas of greeting, worn smooth of all meaning by the steady current of habit, and commends instead the “ridiculous and sublime American variant, ‘Smell me!’”

There is sound theology in this business of smell. The Old Testament writers, fearless anthropomorphists to a man, never hesitate to describe sirloin sacrifices as a sort of aroma therapy to mellow out the Deity. The soothing scent of Noah’s offering softened God up on the question of future floods (Gn 8.21). Given the frequency of such language in the sacrificial regulations we can conclude that if the Lord does not eat, he does at least inhale.

The apostle Paul picks up on this idea in 2 Corinthians 2 where he likens the Christian life to the ticker-tape parade given a triumphant Roman general. The Romans really gassed it up with the incense on such occasions, and the participants in the procession consisted of two basic groups: soldiers who’d fought for the leader and now received their part in the reward, and soldiers who’d fought against him and could now look forward to execution, probably via a tet-a-tet with wild animals in the arena. Both could smell the incense; indeed, neither could choose but smell it. To the loyalists, however, the smell meant victory; to the rebels, it meant death.

“But thanks be to God,” Paul exclaims, “who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and manifests through us the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Him in every place.For we are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; the one an aroma from death to death, to the other an aroma from life to life. And who is adequate for these things?” (2 Cor 2.14-16)

Interestingly enough, the word “aroma” which appears twice in this passage is the Greek osme, the root of our English word for that pesky, persistent sense of smell. If I give off the odor of Christ, the Scripture says, then my spiritual scent will haunt the hearts of all those I encounter. Some will wallow in worldliness like a skunk-sprayed dog, desperate to scrape off or cover up the musk that hints they’ve chosen the wrong side. Others will bathe themselves in the ether like a junior high kid with his dad’s aftershave. Either way our job is not to smell “good” or “bad,” but so to reek of redemption that we make phantosmaniacs of everyone I encounter, driving them nuts with the undying odor of the Savior.

How does one smell so strongly of Jesus as to overpower the blunt stench of self? It isn’t a spray-on deodorant repeatedly applied from without, but a nutrient constantly absorbed from within. I remember once during final exams my senior year in college when I went for a five-mile run and realized my sweat smelled like coffee. I’d been guzzling java furiously for days and what went in had finally found a way out. In the same way, if we drink deeply of living water it inevitably emerges when we sweat out our service, weep out our pain, and bleed out our sacrifice and suffering. This doesn’t happen with a quick spray-on application of Sunday’s sermon or a spritz of the newest devotional book behind each ear. It comes instead from the slow, steady chewing of God’s Word known as lectio divina, the the soaking silences and solitudes of spiritual discipline, and the unseen service offered only in the sight of Christ. And when that happens even those who fill their heads with logical arguments against the truth of the gospel find that the irrational apologetic of experience haunts their hearts with the uncomfortable idea that the whole thing may be true after all.

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August 4, 2009 by djackson.

You’ve heard by now of “Cash for Clunkers,” the program whereby the federal government dishes four and a half K for cars that meet certain specifications as to decrepitude. The argument runs that it’s a win/win deal: drivers of jalopies get new wheels, Detroit gins up more business, and the greenies take heart because those old heaps spewed exhaust and leaked oil and generally ravaged the ozone and the glaciers.

I have no personal stake in the matter. Neither of my cars qualifies, though I just sold a pickup that the Joads would have been embarrassed to drive. Still, I note that not everyone thinks the program is such a hot idea. Jeb Hensarling, a congressman from Texas, complained that the auto industry continues to receive special treatment. Noting that Pilgrim’s Pride, a Texas-based turkey outfit, just filed for bankruptcy, he demanded a bailout for the bird men, tentatively labeled “Cash for Cluckers.”

The congressman’s wordplay set me thinking about other subsidies that quick-thinking pun-dits could dream up. I’ll offer a few off the top of my head. What about “Stash For Clunkers”? We tell stoners that they can trade in their pot, crack, crank, weed, horse, Aunt Hazel, amp, cube and A in exchange for one of the broken-down vehicles the federal government now owns. That way, we don’t have to park all these old hoopties out back of the capitol, we reduce the number of people driving under the influence, and we don’t have to worry about the junkies selling their cars to buy drugs because we’ve already ruined the market.

Here’s another one: “Cash for Dunkers.” This one plays off a slang term for the Old German Baptist Brethren. The idea is that we post a bounty for every mainline Protestant who takes the plunge. The Southern Baptist Convention could reverse its decline in baptisms and all those Methodists and Presbyterians could tithe the bribe money back into their home denominations, who, I’m told, could use the greenbacks about now.

Or maybe “Cash for Suckers,” where we lavish huge amounts of money on people who can prove that they made stupid business deals that ruined their corporations and started a world-wide financial crisis that threw thousands of people out of their jobs and homes. Oh, wait - that one’s already taken.

Yet all of it reminds me somehow of Walter Wangerin’s Ragman, the strong, handsome fellow who drags a cart through the slums and bellows out, “Rags! Rags! New rags for old!” He swaps garments with the human detritus of the world’s dustbins and, in taking their clothing, also takes on their injuries, addictions, and lamentations. Finally he mounts a mound in the midst of the midden and lays down and dies. The following Sunday he bursts to life, his body whole and his rags clean. The narrator closes the story with the simple words: “He dressed me. My Lord, he put new rags on me, and I am a wonder beside him. The Ragman, the Ragman, the Christ.”

For all the clunkers, pluckers, and suckers, all the punks and junkies, the broken-down and blown-up and bankrupt and busted, here’s a bailout that knows no deficit and needs no periodic renewal. Here is redemption free for the taking.

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