Musings: Notes From My Daybook

Lee Camp recently launched a wonderful "radio show" called Tokens from Lipscomb University's campus.  The music is wonderful and creative, interviews provocative and timely, and the theological vision is formative and hopeful.  For example, click here for a recent intervew with Andrew Bacevich whose recent book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, has attracted some attention. For those of you who follow Reinhold Niebuhr, you will find this interview of interest!

For those of you who follow Prairie Home Companion, Tokens is a  more overtly theological "thinking person's" version of that long time favorite show!

I was reminded this morning of a website that I make use of when I am out and about.  I find great blessing in beginning the day with prayer--particularly prayer that takes me beyond the concerns and persons that I usually for.  The pInterior of dome at the Church of the Holy Sepluchre, Jerusalemrayer that I find blessing in the mornings is prayer that calls me into the presence of God.

To do that I often practice prayer that is rooted in the ancient traditions and rhythms of Christian prayer.  This kind of prayer finds its earliest practice in the prayer of Israel in the psalter.  Today, Christian people pray these prayers throughout the world.  I find great meaning in praying these scripture prayers and ancient Christian prayers with other Christians each day.

Interested.  Consider this site  as a place to begin.

Stopped in at a blue grass jam for a few minutes this evening and heard a group play a tune that evoked a deep longing as it spoke a deep and seldom spoken truth.  So I did some google sleuthing and discovered Gillian Welch.  Gillian, along with her partner David Rawlings, play some really great folk and neoCountry material. This song, Annabelle, evokes the haunting loss and the struggle of the rural south.  And as it does, it speaks to the larger human condition.

Here is Welch and Rawlings playing the song I heard tonight:

And here are the lyrics to Annabelle:

We lease twenty acres and one ginny mule
From the Alabama trust
For half of the cotton and a third of the corn
We get a handful of dust

We cannot have all things to please us
No matter how we try
Until we've all gone to Jesus
We can only wonder why

I had a daughter, called her Annabelle
She's the apple of my eye
Tried to give her something like I never had
Didn't ever want to ever hear her cry

We cannot have all things to please us
No matter how we try
Until we've all gone to Jesus
We can only wonder why

When I'm dead and buried I'll take a hard life of tears
From every day I've ever known
Anna's in the churchyard, she got no life at all
She only got these words on a stone

We cannot have all things to please us
No matter how we try
Until we've all gone to Jesus
We can only wonder why

In a time when stock markets plunge, factories close, jobs disappear, armies deploy, and governments change it is easy to dwell on all that changes and grow melancholy or anxious.  Indeed, if left to what one finds in the newspaper or the evening news, the conclusion is that all is lost.  But there is another way to see what is happening in our world.

We are not the first persons to go through recessions and war, nor are we the only people in the world to struggle with what the future holds.  In fact, every generation has its challenges.  Ours are no worse.

Of course, that raises the particular challenge of how then shall we live?  Answers abound.  We could suggest that we should live with confidence or with boldness or with great hope in the future.  Such answers are exciting to consider and certainly have merit.

But I would suggest a different answer.  I think that the best way to live is to live with gratitude.  To live with gratitude means to enjoy the pleasure of each new day and the things that each day brings.  To live with gratitude encompasses the sacredness of life and the pleasure it is to be in the created world and to live with others.  To live with gratitude embraces the love of God for each one of us as a person, unique and blessed.  "I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you. . . ", says Paul (Phil 1.3)

Perhaps that is what makes Thanksgiving such a special holiday.  Though it is not apart of the church's calendar, it stands as a special time to practice the fine and wonderfully human art of thanksgiving.  Of course, it is the sort of thing that should be a daily routine.  But, if you are like me, I really appreciate the reminder Thanksgiving brings.

I am always reminded of this simple truth by Gerhard Frost's poem, Takk for Alt:

She was not quite ninety-seven
when she died.
One who waited at her side
heard her say it:
"Takk for alt" "Thank you for everything."
It was her home-going word to God.

Like a good guest
she addressed her Host.
She spoke as one well-taught,
well-taught by life,
by memory and expectation!

To be gift-conscious is to be wise;
to know whom to thank is grace indeed.
To know the gift and love the Giver,
to have learned life's dearest lesson,
is to be rich toward God.

After spending various chunks of the day reading about body metaphors, what is prophecy, and (the really big one) what does Paul mean by various kinds of tongues, I am ready to cry out "enough."  What Paul was doing was really quite simple.  He was calling a divided congregation that was creating more tension by the way they embraced spiritual gifts in a hierarchical way, to lay off.  He even gives them a wonderful and poetically moving call to embrace love over fussing about gifts.  Why not practice love, Paul asks.  It is the only thing that will really last.

And yet, Christian people still get all divided over the very things that folk in Corinth were fussing over.  Think we would learn, but it seems that we are a little slow on this.

In a day where secular thinking has turned us into a nation of (now somewhat deflated) consumers, a deluge of the world's religious traditions are finding a place in North America, where people are engaging in both a search for spirituality, and while others are making more rabid claims for atheism, people who make the claim that Jesus is Lord, really need to think anew about what it means to be the body of Christ.  Ironic to think about an athlete who is preparing to run a marathon who chooses to not speak to his foot or care for it.

In terms of Christian witness to our world, what the world needs to see from Christians is a body that is characterized by love.  Perhaps it with the very diversity that we struggle with, that God chooses to make his message known in our world.  If I can not embrace the person who makes the confession that Jesus is Lord but doesn't worship the way I do, then what happens to the body and to our witness?

I think it is time for a membership drive for the church.  I am not speaking of new members, though the door is open and yes that is what God desires.  But I am thinking that it is time to recognize and discover the members of the body that we are so often loathe to recognize.  All members are needed!