Brothers and Sisters -
One time I asked my friend Derek what it was like to be married. "Is it a good gig?" He said, "It feels right. It feels like what you were supposed to do. Like what people were meant to do."
When you get to be my age, your friends start to marry off. Some of my friends from school have already started having children. Sometimes, when I see pictures of them and their spouses and babies, I feel like I am moving farther away from that point, and not closer.
In other news, I have heard and read a great deal of anecdotal evidence that suggests that nearly everyone at some point or another suspects that they are not okay, that something is wrong with them, that they are losing their mind. We're probably right.
your friend to the bitter end,
-zfa
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Brothers and Sisters -
I think that "Bastards of Young" by the Replacements is one of the greatest rock 'n' roll songs ever recorded. If an alien from outer space came to earth, and he knew nothing of human culture, and he asked me, "What is this rock 'n' roll you speak of?" I would say, "This is," and then I would play "Bastards of Young" for him, and he would understand. Right after the introductory lick, the whole band hits, and Paul Westerberg just screams, and the scream comes from his guts, and I am awestruck and dumbstruck by the purity of the rock 'n' roll that ensues.
Your Friend to the Bitter End,
-zfa
I think that "Bastards of Young" by the Replacements is one of the greatest rock 'n' roll songs ever recorded. If an alien from outer space came to earth, and he knew nothing of human culture, and he asked me, "What is this rock 'n' roll you speak of?" I would say, "This is," and then I would play "Bastards of Young" for him, and he would understand. Right after the introductory lick, the whole band hits, and Paul Westerberg just screams, and the scream comes from his guts, and I am awestruck and dumbstruck by the purity of the rock 'n' roll that ensues.
Your Friend to the Bitter End,
-zfa
Monday, June 23, 2008
Brothers and Sisters -
There once was a rock 'n' roll band called the Murder City Devils. They had a song called "I Want a Lot Now." The British artist Damien Hirst titled his autobiography I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, With Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now. What a great title to capture our generation's voracity for experience. Wanting, I think, is the bottom line of human existence. When Woody Allen was questioned about an affair that he had with his adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. He responded, "The heart wants what it wants." All the religions of the world, even the secular ones, reckon with desire in some way or another. The Buddha believed that desire and strivings were the source of all human suffering, and that we must strike them from our hearts in order to achieve enlightenment, to achieve Nirvana. The Christian pastor John Piper writes that there is a deficiency in our wanting, that we don't want enough, that we are too easily satisfied with lesser things than the love of God.
Sigmund Freud was an atheist. He wrote that "religion derives its strength from the fact that it is in line with our instinctual desires."
Mike Yaconelli wrote that, "our search for love, for meaning, for happiness, is often our search for God in disguise."
Is God real because we want Him or do we want Him because He's real?
Your Friend to the Bitter End,
-zfa
There once was a rock 'n' roll band called the Murder City Devils. They had a song called "I Want a Lot Now." The British artist Damien Hirst titled his autobiography I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, With Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now. What a great title to capture our generation's voracity for experience. Wanting, I think, is the bottom line of human existence. When Woody Allen was questioned about an affair that he had with his adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. He responded, "The heart wants what it wants." All the religions of the world, even the secular ones, reckon with desire in some way or another. The Buddha believed that desire and strivings were the source of all human suffering, and that we must strike them from our hearts in order to achieve enlightenment, to achieve Nirvana. The Christian pastor John Piper writes that there is a deficiency in our wanting, that we don't want enough, that we are too easily satisfied with lesser things than the love of God.
Sigmund Freud was an atheist. He wrote that "religion derives its strength from the fact that it is in line with our instinctual desires."
Mike Yaconelli wrote that, "our search for love, for meaning, for happiness, is often our search for God in disguise."
Is God real because we want Him or do we want Him because He's real?
Your Friend to the Bitter End,
-zfa
Monday, June 9, 2008
"There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind." - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one can share its joy." - Proverbs 14.
Sometimes, I wonder about myself. I wonder about how knowable I am, how knowable each of us is. I once had a conversation with my friend Antonio. I asked him, "If your consciousness was divisible, and you could reckon it as a percentage, how much of you is present at any given moment, and how much of you is somewhere else?" I told him that I didn't think I was ever more than ten or fifteen percent present, I was always mostly somewhere else.
I know a lot has been written about language, and how maybe it's arbitrary, but maybe it's adequate. I had a conversation along these lines. I told my friend that our insides are like a galaxy, billions of miles across. We can wander around inside ourselves without words, but to know each other, we have to have words. The words by which I know you, I told her, are like spaceships. Each one is headed in opposite directions in a huge galaxy, and they pass within sight of each other. At a window in each of the spaceships, there stands an astronaut. Each astronaut sees the other, and they wave at each other. Then they go on. That is what it is like to talk to someone. You are aware of all the other space in them, only because you know it in yourself. The Bible says, "Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one can share its joy." Each person is familiar with his own galaxy, but the spaceships aren't enough.
This is the kind of thing I think about all day.
I don't know what a self is. I think it is mostly memories and experiences. I don't know if we are born with anything. Maybe there is total depravity and original sin; how else can we account for everyone inevitably becoming so bad? But I experience all this stuff, and then I remember it, and the remembering cannot help but be interpretive. It's like history. When Copernicus discovered that the Earth revolved around the sun, it wasn't epic. It was just a cool discovery. It is all the scientific discoveries since then that made it epic. The discovery didn't know that it was going to be a foundation for future experiments in astronomy. The discovery didn't know that it represented the decentralization of man in the cosmos. It just knew that it was a discovery. It was assigned meaning by all the stuff that came after it. When Jesus died, nobody (except maybe he himself) knew that God was reconciling the world to himself, was reconciling Jews to Gentiles, nobody knew that he was atoning for sins or absorbing God's wrath. What they saw was just a guy dying. It took a revelation to figure out the rest.
Your Friend to the Bitter End,
-zfa
"Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one can share its joy." - Proverbs 14.
Sometimes, I wonder about myself. I wonder about how knowable I am, how knowable each of us is. I once had a conversation with my friend Antonio. I asked him, "If your consciousness was divisible, and you could reckon it as a percentage, how much of you is present at any given moment, and how much of you is somewhere else?" I told him that I didn't think I was ever more than ten or fifteen percent present, I was always mostly somewhere else.
I know a lot has been written about language, and how maybe it's arbitrary, but maybe it's adequate. I had a conversation along these lines. I told my friend that our insides are like a galaxy, billions of miles across. We can wander around inside ourselves without words, but to know each other, we have to have words. The words by which I know you, I told her, are like spaceships. Each one is headed in opposite directions in a huge galaxy, and they pass within sight of each other. At a window in each of the spaceships, there stands an astronaut. Each astronaut sees the other, and they wave at each other. Then they go on. That is what it is like to talk to someone. You are aware of all the other space in them, only because you know it in yourself. The Bible says, "Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one can share its joy." Each person is familiar with his own galaxy, but the spaceships aren't enough.
This is the kind of thing I think about all day.
I don't know what a self is. I think it is mostly memories and experiences. I don't know if we are born with anything. Maybe there is total depravity and original sin; how else can we account for everyone inevitably becoming so bad? But I experience all this stuff, and then I remember it, and the remembering cannot help but be interpretive. It's like history. When Copernicus discovered that the Earth revolved around the sun, it wasn't epic. It was just a cool discovery. It is all the scientific discoveries since then that made it epic. The discovery didn't know that it was going to be a foundation for future experiments in astronomy. The discovery didn't know that it represented the decentralization of man in the cosmos. It just knew that it was a discovery. It was assigned meaning by all the stuff that came after it. When Jesus died, nobody (except maybe he himself) knew that God was reconciling the world to himself, was reconciling Jews to Gentiles, nobody knew that he was atoning for sins or absorbing God's wrath. What they saw was just a guy dying. It took a revelation to figure out the rest.
Your Friend to the Bitter End,
-zfa
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Brothers and Sisters -
The Dominican Republic's presidential election occurs tomorrow. As in America, presidential elections are held every four years. In contrast to America, there is little neutrality, complacency, or cynicism toward politics. It seems that everyone supports his favored candidate with a degree of fanaticism. The "disco lights" mentioned in the article below pass my house here several times a day, laden with generators and amplifiers, blasting baracha music and political slogans. Helicopters emblazoned with the different candidates' logos have flown over my rooftop. Even in the tiny, remote villages south of Monte Crisit, some houses display eight-foot banners, plastered with the faces and slogans of the three candidates. I received e-mails yesterday and today from the U. S. consulate and Santo Domingo warning me to stay away from political demonstrations, and now I guess I know why. Following is a transcript from Dominican Today, the D.R.'s English-language news source. This incident occurred in a small town about 25 kilometers from where I live in Monte Cristi.
VILLA VASQUEZ.- The country’s electoral campaign concluded with violence in the Northwest, when members of the ruling PLD and opposition PRD parties in a shootout in this municipality, leaving three dead, among them former deputy Antonio Fernandez, 50, and several wounded.
The other two deceased are Carlos Polanco, 43, of the PLD and Isidro Polanco Tavárez, 47, of the PRD.
The shootings took place at 9:45 p.m. when two vehicles called “disco lights” promoting the two opposing presidential candidates came across each other in the street and an argument ensued.
Fernandez, who had recently left the PRD to formally join the PLD, had just left one of his businesses in the area, together with Polanco, who according to newspaper El Caribe, was one of his bodyguards.
The bodies were taken to a morgue in Villa Vásquez.
Please pray for peace in the Dominican Republic. Pray for the churches of Villa Vasquez to respond appropriately to this tragedy, and pray for God to renew within all of us the conviction to work for peace in the world.
Your Friend to the Bitter End,
-zfa
The Dominican Republic's presidential election occurs tomorrow. As in America, presidential elections are held every four years. In contrast to America, there is little neutrality, complacency, or cynicism toward politics. It seems that everyone supports his favored candidate with a degree of fanaticism. The "disco lights" mentioned in the article below pass my house here several times a day, laden with generators and amplifiers, blasting baracha music and political slogans. Helicopters emblazoned with the different candidates' logos have flown over my rooftop. Even in the tiny, remote villages south of Monte Crisit, some houses display eight-foot banners, plastered with the faces and slogans of the three candidates. I received e-mails yesterday and today from the U. S. consulate and Santo Domingo warning me to stay away from political demonstrations, and now I guess I know why. Following is a transcript from Dominican Today, the D.R.'s English-language news source. This incident occurred in a small town about 25 kilometers from where I live in Monte Cristi.
VILLA VASQUEZ.- The country’s electoral campaign concluded with violence in the Northwest, when members of the ruling PLD and opposition PRD parties in a shootout in this municipality, leaving three dead, among them former deputy Antonio Fernandez, 50, and several wounded.
The other two deceased are Carlos Polanco, 43, of the PLD and Isidro Polanco Tavárez, 47, of the PRD.
The shootings took place at 9:45 p.m. when two vehicles called “disco lights” promoting the two opposing presidential candidates came across each other in the street and an argument ensued.
Fernandez, who had recently left the PRD to formally join the PLD, had just left one of his businesses in the area, together with Polanco, who according to newspaper El Caribe, was one of his bodyguards.
The bodies were taken to a morgue in Villa Vásquez.
Please pray for peace in the Dominican Republic. Pray for the churches of Villa Vasquez to respond appropriately to this tragedy, and pray for God to renew within all of us the conviction to work for peace in the world.
Your Friend to the Bitter End,
-zfa
Welcome
Brothers and Sisters -
Hello, and welcome to my blog, Vicit Agnus Noster. The title of this blog is derived from an old Moravian creed: "Vicit Agnus Noster, Eum Sequamur," which translates, "Our Lamb has conquered; let us follow him." The Moravians, both past and present, represent a commitment to peacemaking and a zeal for world mission. I share these two interests, and much of my future posts will concern one or both of them (I believe they are inextricably related). I would like this blog to be a forum for the free exchange of ideas among friends. Although computer-mediated social interaction is not without its problems, I am glad to have the opportunity to communicate with far-flung friends, and to connect with new friends who share these intersets and who can offer challenges, meditations, questions, and comments. My interests also include literature, particularly twentieth-century American literature - it illumines in narrative forms the ideas and cultural myths that have shaped and mis-shaped me.
Anyhow, come post and read and contribute.
Your Friend to the Bitter End,
-zfa
Hello, and welcome to my blog, Vicit Agnus Noster. The title of this blog is derived from an old Moravian creed: "Vicit Agnus Noster, Eum Sequamur," which translates, "Our Lamb has conquered; let us follow him." The Moravians, both past and present, represent a commitment to peacemaking and a zeal for world mission. I share these two interests, and much of my future posts will concern one or both of them (I believe they are inextricably related). I would like this blog to be a forum for the free exchange of ideas among friends. Although computer-mediated social interaction is not without its problems, I am glad to have the opportunity to communicate with far-flung friends, and to connect with new friends who share these intersets and who can offer challenges, meditations, questions, and comments. My interests also include literature, particularly twentieth-century American literature - it illumines in narrative forms the ideas and cultural myths that have shaped and mis-shaped me.
Anyhow, come post and read and contribute.
Your Friend to the Bitter End,
-zfa
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