It would’ve been nice to let Bishop Wright talk more in this video, instead of Colbert cracking so many jokes (which weren’t all that funny) but for what it’s worth, check out the book:

recently, i’ve come across two quotes from two ladies that i deeply respect and i wanted to share them with you:

“The higher Christian churches – where, if anywhere, I belong — come
at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and
pomp, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of
creatures to have dealings with God.  I often think of the set pieces
of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to
God without their getting killed.  In the high churches they saunter
through the liturgy  like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who
have long since forgotten their danger.  If God were to blast such a
service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely
shocked.  But in the low churches you expect it any minute.  This is
the beginning of wisdom.”

–Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (New York: Perennial, 1977), 59.

“I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.”

– Flannery O’Connor in a personal letter to Elizabeth Hester after being called a fascist

simply breathtaking…

my brother and sister called me from bon iver’s minnesota show last night… i went on a mission to find some good videos online, and these were just posted recently by LaBlogotheque where Bon Iver took france by storm…

go and watch the other videos and be set free

Bon Iver Part I

Bon Iver Part II

if my vote counts for anything, this gets my “best album of 2008″ award…

I dove headlong into N.T. Wright’s latest book, Surprised by Hope, which is a good introduction to his theology. As I read, I found myself getting giddy as I read about the Resurrection of Jesus ushering in “not simply a new religious possibility, not simply a new ethic or a new way of salvation, but a new creation.” I got giddy because my little experience thus far on this earth is finding a track to discover its significance. I got giddy as I pondered the smile of the risen Christ extending his pierced hand to me as an invitation to walk in this new creation life. The more I thought about it, the more I liked this splendid interruption in my desire to live life in a calculated manner of cause and effect. A huge question mark gets painted around this notion of living according to any other sort of narrative. This “newness” that the Resurrection brings is very attractive to me. It sets you into a mood that’s calming and pleasurable. Like holding a newborn baby, or like holding your lover in a reciprocal embrace. I got giddy because these things are quite good things in life that, for the first time, I’m given the gift of experiencing them as signposts that point us toward a greater creation that is to come (and is in fact coming!).

To think of Resurrection, not in terms of bunnies or new dresses, but in terms of something that breaks into your life from the background which, in turn, demands that a new back drop be strung up, becomes a new way of seeing–not through the skeptic’s sneer, but through a lover’s embrace. Life steps into waking Life and you’re suddenly given permission to really live, and to really love. It’s like the margins get reset. Wittgenstein said that “It is love that believes the resurrection.” Bishop Wright takes this to mean that:

“the resurrection is not, as it were, a highly peculiar event within the present world (though it is that as well); it is, principally, the defining event of the new creation, the world that is being born with Jesus. If we are even to glimpse this new world, let alone enter it, we will need a different kind of knowing, a knowing that involves us in new ways, an epistemology that draws out from us not just the cool appraisal of detached quasi-scientific research but also that whole-person engagement and involvement for which the best shorthand is ‘love,’ in the full Johannine sense of agape … Just because it takes agape to believe the resurrection, that doesn’t mean that all that happened was that Peter and the others felt their hearts strangely warmed. Precisely because it is love we are talking about, it must have a correlative reality in the world outside the lover. Love is the deepest mode of knowing because it is love that, while completely engaging with reality other than itself, affirms and celebrates that other-than-self reality.”

[I'm not even sure if I've connected any dots here, but hey, here's for trying...]

i don’t know if this happens to you, but sometimes when i’m reading, i’ll come across a passage that totally puts words to some sort of inner twinge that i’ve felt for some time. this happened today with this passage:

“Given such courage [made available by Christ's redeeming work], we can admit the glimpses of death present in our everyday life. Fall leaves–at once fire-spangled and decayed, burning with color and dry as dust, beautiful and sad–speak of death. The quiet withering away of a friendship or movement from one job to another, simple goodbyes, episodes of forgetfulness, the realization that no moment or experience can ever be exactly duplicated: all these are little deaths. They demonstrate to us that, this side of our resurrection, all things change, melt, fade, or otherwise pass away. They are signs, like glints in a moving mirror or reflections in a passing car window, of our mortality and the mortality of everything and everyone we love on this earth. We can expend energy trying to ignore these reminders. But Christian spirituality presents another way. It calls us to see them as they are, shot through with pain. And without pretending there is no pain, it calls us to see them in the light of their transformation in Christ and the lasting joys of resurrection happiness. The question then is not, How do we hold on to our earthly joys and try to keep them just as they are, as long as we can? Instead, the question becomes, How do we love these things in God and in hope of eternal life? How do we keep perspective and better fit ourselves–and our world–for enjoyment of the real, true, and final happiness that is to come?”

    The last time I was at Rosa’s house, it was the night before Massi’s funeral. She was completely destroyed after losing her fiancee (and rightfully so!) and she didn’t want to eat or get out of bed. So when Jason and I went to visit her last night, it was comforting for me to see her sitting at the dinner table with her family.
    The television wasn’t squawking over our slow-starting conversation at the table but was turned down just low enough for me to miss out on the overdubbed, eloquent dialog of a headhunter and his native american counterpart in a show that I hadn’t seen in years called Renegade. Some sort of ragu pasta was dished out on plastic plates and we respectfully declined as it passed our way. We had both already eaten before we came, and we weren’t intending to stay long. Jason did a good job opening up conversation while my eyes went around the kitchen, to the television, and back to the table.
    Rosa’s parents aren’t what you’d normally think of when you think of a set of Italian parents. If I had to describe them to you, words like rustic come to mind. In Italian, the word that comes to me, is usually found on the brown packet of sugar that I always go for when drinking an espresso. I don’t care for the pretty, white, refined, sugar. But I normally reach for that rough, raw, crude, unprocessed, unrefined, brown sugar that says grezzo on it. When drinking coffee, I prefer this sort of sugar. When sitting at the table with Rosa’s parents, I kept thinking “sugar packet.” They aren’t the normal kind of folk that I run into in the city. They come from the blue collar, farm stock, that you know how hard they work by looking at the lines on their leathered faces, calloused hands, and darkened fingernails. While Jason maintained conversation with Rosa, I kept wanting to find an avenue into the conversation between her parents and brother on the other end of the table. They spoke through a thick accent that forced me to listen harder.
    At some point, the two conversations going on at the table converged on the topic of justice. Everyone was in agreement that Massi didn’t deserve this short of a life and that it didn’t make sense that there is still in existence dishonest men with longer lives. I quickly found a spot to make a joke in order to lighten up the mood, “Yea, like that Antonidretti guy!” The conversation stopped and everyone paused at this foreigner trying to figure out what he was saying. “What?” I tried my phrase again, sounding it out slower, “An-tone-eee-ooo–teee” Rosa just kind of looked at me confused. I tried another route real quick, “You know, il Divo, that politician, he’s really old, they made a movie about him?” Rosa’s dad fixed his askewed glance as if his eyes had been crossed, and unfurrowed his brow, “Oh! Andreotti!” Everyone gave out a sigh, as the joke quickly faded into confusion, and then resolution. Her dad gave out a big belly laugh because he caught the joke and said something in dialect like, “yea that guy will never die!” I tapped Jason on the leg, under the table, because I was surprised that the joke was salvaged and Jason said under his breath, “three points for you.”
    We eventually went into the other room and Rosa began asking us different questions that she had been wrestling with. The first one had to do with, “Can Massi see what I’m doing now and is he going to be angry with me if I don’t honor him with the rest of my life?” This spun out into a very interesting discussion on how little the Bible talks about intermediary states and what the resurrection means for us in our day to day lives. Her other big question centered on Jesus’ invitation “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you
do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this
mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done. If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer” (Matt. 21:21-22). Why would God not heal Massi if she asked for this in faith? This led into a great discussion about doubt not being sinful, God not having a meticulous destiny for everything that happens, and how prayer is an invitation to collaboration. I now realize in summing up our long evening, that it sounds like we had cliches for every question that she asked. This is not the case. It really was a great evening with hard questions.
    I think in our evangelical circles, there exists a hard-nosed, non-human, spirituality that says “Rosa should be back in church a week or so after the funeral with hands raised in worship praising the God who giveth and taketh away.” Rosa said that she’s had people come up to her and give her this unsolicited advice. I can’t help but think how cruel this way of thinking is. What kind of spirituality do you have if it prohibits you from fully expressing yourself in your humanity? What kind of spirituality do you have if you have to be the strong one all the time and not let anyone in on what you’re really feeling? When your whole world falls apart into a rubbled heap, and you’re left to decide whether it’s best to sit in that rubble or start rebuilding, who do you want there with you? The religious person who tells you that your current suffering is connected to some hidden sin in your life and that you should get back to attending church? I don’t think so. When it comes to rebuilding your shattered faith, you need more room to breathe, to question, to feel, to build. You need more space to be the human that you are in this new context in which your old forms of faith are like broken toys in a larger playground.
    I felt like, last night, Rosa was given permission to step into that space, that extra room. I don’t think we were able to speak to all of her doubts. And on the car ride back, I felt like maybe I had said too much. But what I think is best, in these situations, is that people are given the space and the grace to be people. When Christ came to this earth, he didn’t come as an angelic being, aloof from all contamination of this life. No, he came as one of us–a human, (grezzo even!). And he showed us how to be fully human. And what I’m finding out, is that in ministry, a lot of our canned answers and conventional theology is for the angels, and not for humans.

here’s an irish group you should give a listen to called ‘the swell season’: