Travel

My reading year started in a place of aspiration and hope. A chance to jump start some travel plans by diving in to a holiday purchase, Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel. Part philosophical and spiritual exercise, Airplane Mode is an unfiltered look at why we travel and the complicated  history of how travel came to be. I said as much in my review, but it’s rare to cross paths with a really good travel book. This is one of those that immediately found a place on my forever shelf.

Throughout 2024 I read a few more titles related to travel, including the classic Steinbeck memoir Travels With Charley which was as quaint and lovely as I expected with its broad view lens of America from the road, and the quirky, fun A Travel Guide To The Middle Ages: The World Through Medieval Eyes. I even managed to catch up with a holdover from the previous years travels to Wisconsin and Milwaukee (Brewtown Tales: Stories From Milwaukee and Beyond) and a couple tbr titles that had been eluding me for a while (Conor Knightons Leave Only Footprints and Frank Delaney’s narrative take on the history of Ireland). There were, however, three specific titles that topped my list in this genre, all for different reasons:

Off The Tracks: A Meditation on Train Journeys in a Time of No Travel by Pamela Mulloy

This Storied River: Legend and Lore of the Upper Mississippi by Dennis McCann

Imagined Places: Journies Into Literary America

Mulloy utilizes the pandemic as an opportunity to reflect on the past, present and future of train travel, effectively rendering this a love letter to a nostalgic but still relevant approach to everyday commutes and exploration. McCann writes a travel itinerary using a writer to navigate the spaces that anchored their stories. A particular insight has stuck with me all year- we all have two basic conceptions of place, the place in which we live and the place(s) we are drawn to. And lastly, McCann provided me with a welcome new addition for my growing library of books on my favorite river- the Mississippi. What makes this stand out is not just the insights he brings to his area of focus (the upper river), it’s the fact that he melds this into an easy and helpful travel itinerary. Leaves me with a desire to return, especially given I purchase this following my completion of the upper portion of the Great River Road this past summer. That leaves the final stretch from Memphis to New Orleans on my bucket list

Non-Fiction

Perhaps fitting within the travel genre, this memoir of one reporters unexpected opportunity to document the otherwise secretive and enigmatic life of Harper Lee (The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee) is another holdover from my trip to Alabama and Georgia the previous summer, having visited the place this book documents. On that level this uneven, not well written and mired in controversy work gained a sort of grassroots level charm that made its weaknesses easy go forgive. If nothing else it opened uo the writers relationship to this place she called home.

Another book worth a mention is Charlie Peakocks Why Everything That Doesn’t Matter, Matters So Much: The Way of Love in a World of Hurt, a book he tandem wrote with his wife Andi Ashworth. It’s a sort of autobiography that uses their storied journey through the complicated nature of the American Christian music scene of the 80s and 90s into a new found appreciation and perspective for where they are now, coming to find God in the ordinary and the everyday, and recognizing that we are all occupying space in the same circle moving in one of two directions- away from Jesus or towards Jesus.

Three particular standouts for me in this genre:

From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough

The Half Bird: One Woman’s voyage of self-discovery from Land’s End to the shores of Greece by Susan Smillie

Gone to the Woods: Surviving a Lost Childhood by Gary Paulsen

The story behind this memoir from and about Lisa Marie is as captivating as the story itself. Following Lisa Marie’s death, her daughter completed this project by forming it into a conversation between her and her mother across the great divide. It’s  powerful, along with being an unfiltered, and uncensored fusion of perspectives shedding light on generational bonds. Occupying a different space is The Half Bird, the story of one woman’s unexpected journey on to the sea and around the shores following  life upended by circumstances and struggle. I adore the waterfront, I’m not as fascinated by journeys on the water, so I didn’t expect much from this book. Whatever compelled me towards it was following a right intuition, as it turned out to be one of the biggest surprises of the year. A book about finding light in the dark, beauty in the storm., all wrapped around this touching relationship she forms with her boat (Isean).

Lastly, the post humous release of Paulsens memoir, Gone to the Woods, was perhaps the most affecting reading experience of 2024, Paulsen being a formative figure from my own childhood and a personal hero. What made this more special is I had no idea it was being related until I accidentally stumbled across it.

History

Sadly, I didn’t read a ton of history books this year, but three that stood out for me:

Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land by Jacob Mikanowski/The Middle Kimgdoms: A New History of Cemtral Europe by Martyn Rady

The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins by Stafanos Geroulanos

Strange Religion: How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling by Nijay Gupta

The first mentions were tandem or supporting reads helping to unpack the unique history and positioning of central Europe, an area I’ve had an interest in ever since visiting Ukraine. There’s a lot of overlap, with Goodby being a bit more interested in the philosophical and cultural underpinnings and Middle Kingdoms being the more accessible, straight forward history of a place that has consistently struggled with matters of langauge and identity in spaces with ever changing borders, caught between powers east and west.

The Invention of Prehistory is probably my most recommended book of 2024, bringing to light important insights about how it is we perceive progress and the enlightened West at the hands of invented caricatures of a non-existent ancient past we use to prop up our us versus them paradigms. Gupta, a fitting compliment to the Invention of Prehistory in some way, helps to explore how the first Christians found themselves   confronting and challenging these us versus them paradigms in their own context of an invented paradigm of Empire and its false promises of unity and progress. It’s just as weird to the world to confront this invented prehistory and its problems today,  given it comes at the hands of Empire and its same promises in the modern world.

Theology

Unlike history, I had a big year when it comes to transformative and paradigm shifting theology reads in 2024. The highlights:

Lamb of the Free: Recovering the Varied Sacrificial Understandings of Jesus Death by Andrew Remington Rillera (required reading for anyone interested in exploring fundamental misunderstandings of the sacrificial system and better more faithful readings that can challenge problematic allegiances to things that penal substitution)

Paul and Time: Life in the Temporality of Christ by Ann Jervis (might sound a bit geeky, but it is much more relevant than the might think, delving into the complicated notion of the already-not yet, new/old age, fulfillment of the Law language that permeates Paul’s writings as a faithful Jew)

Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles, Israelites by Jason Staples (a book that’s been shaking up the scene in 2024, making a case for how much of our theology in the West has been built on wrong conceptions of the terms Israel, Jew, Judean and Gentile. Understanding how each of these terms have their own meaning and are not interchangeable, as they often become in common readings, opens up important observations about the narrative we find in Paul’s writings, particularly as it sits in relationship to the Gospels)

Christmaker: A Life of John the Baptist by James McGrath (a simple but well researched, concise and interesting work that seeks to bring the character of John the Baptizer out of the inevitable shadows cast by the one who would come after. For anyone interested in learning, more about the narrative and historical connections between John’s ministry and Jesus’ ministry, including gaining insight into what baptism was and how it applies to Jesus)

The Wood Between the Worlds: A Poetic Theology of the Cross by Brian Zahnd (a beautiful take on the cross, using what he calls a theopoetic lens to bring some of its baggage to the forefront of some long standing theological positions so that we might be able to reimgine it afresh)

Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age by Richard Beck (It is a book for those who have struggled with this present age, who have been left feeling disenchanted by it all, who have been left with more questions than answers, and whom have a desire to find some direction in the language and experience of faith. In knowing how to recover an enchanted faith. there are differences between skepticism and enchantment. It is the difference between a “scientific description of the world” versus “beholding the sacred meaning of the world.” The question is not whether the observations and data are true- we all observe the same world. It’s about what has the power to define the meaning of reality and how we get there. The invitation is to rengage the hunt, to learn how to perceive reality anew the way faith intends to see it. Enables us to see it. It is about learning how to submit our skepticism to the imaginative power that faith affords us. Not in abandoning our questions and our sense of reason, but allowing it to be captured by that which can expose the limits of our knowledge and awareness.)

Passions of the Soul by Rowan Williams (This is the kind of book one highlights and cites and quotes and returns to. It’s small, it’s brief, but it’s powerful, even if you have no connection to the Eastern Orthodox Tradition. It is universal, and it will connect you not just to the Gospel, but to the fundamental heart and nature of the Gospel as a way of knowing, a way of telling the story about our lives and this world in such a way that reveals its truthfulness more deeply and more intuitively.)

Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson (it’s not just Robinsons grace filled spirit and approach that makes this book shine, it’s her willingness to embrace it all- the challenges of both faithful criticisms and academic rigor and the challenges of faithful conviction. She exhibits how to do this in real time, walking through the text, asking good questions, and exploring the potentials. The result is an invitation to fall in love with the process, and more importantly to trust it).

The Challenge of Acts: Rediscovering What the Church Was and Is by NT Wright (There is nothing necessarily new in the details, language and approach for anyone who has read Wright, but as is typical, the richness is in a narrowed focus, a fresh lens, and a particular application of his ideas in a text he hasn’t quite dived before, at least not in this way. A nice mix of academic and pastoral interests)

Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times by Elizabeth Oldfield/Everybody Come Alive: A Memoir in Essays by Marcie Walker (two books about what it means to be alive in spirit, faith and circumstance, albeit from two very different perspectives sharing equal degrees of skepticism, enchantment and hope)

A Life of Jesus by Shusaku Endo (picked this up after it was announced that Scorsese would be adapting it, it’s a classic text with his familiar approach to faith and the Christian story, seeing it through the lens of culture and history and contextualization)

Science/Philosophy

The Sovereignty of the Good by Iris Murdoch (What Murdoch argues for is an essential differentiating between beauty and goodness. Beauty is that which we can observe and experience as a shadow, while goodness is the higher virtue that can only be seen dimly. To say that goodness can never truly be grasped or seen or reached or defined might seem antithetical to the modern approach, but it is in fact the very thing that allows us to locate it within the empirical process. What we observe then in beauty (and its counter, the ugly) is freed from having to bear the weight of explaining it’s own existence, and it is this act of seeing that binds us necessarily to knowledge as an intrinsically external reality)

Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters by Charan Ranganath/Matter and Memory by Henri Bergson (two different explorations of memory using the field of science, one exploring the biological function, the other exploring the philosophical and historucal component. Both solid reads and good additions for anyone interested in the topic, Why We Remember being the more accessible and practical of the two).

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong/Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions by Cass Sunstein (Both books left their mark on me in their own way, the first one exploring how seeing and interacting through the sensee is a universal reality with unique expressions, not better or worse, simply framing that perspective in ways that create different  vantage points with different strengths across the field of what we would call life, enabling one to see what the other cannot. Animal rights is a practical and political and moral/ethical discussion looking at the disparity that exists in how we treat one life form differently than another. It challenges how we might conceive of something like the basic right to life as a universal value and some of the logical arguments that both challenge and support it)

The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves by Alexandra Hudson/On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Danya Ruttenberg (I’m not sure either of these reads ultimately establishes the necessary foundation for its ideas, but the ideas of civility and reconciliation have a strength all their own, making these two books important and relevant)

Supercommunicators: How To Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg/Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Chamge Your Life through the Power of Storyelling by Matthew Dicks (in case one wasn’t convinced, these are two books that show how the science behind our interactions in this world are all about necessary manipulation. However one feels about this realization, both books give practical insight for how to communicate with intentiom towards a given and wanted end)

The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language is, and What One Has To Do With the Other by Walker Percy (one of my books of the year, for sure. The way he helps distinguish between sign and symbol, both relating to the role of language in shaping knowledge of his world, is profund, illuminating and compelling)

Fiction

As I sit here writing this, i just finished a first chapter in Kawaguchi’s Before We Say Goodbye. It has become something of a rite of passage for entering into the new year, as every year it seems I kick things off with the next in the series. In 2024 it was Before Your Memory Fades, which once again follows the familiar emotional and sentimental pattern that it has become famous for. It’s like an old friend.

A second note about 2024: I read a lot of books about books. The Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, The Book of Doors, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, Bookshops and Bonedust, The Book of Stolen Dreams, The Ogress and the Orphans (that last one doesn’t have books in the title, but a library sits at its center).

A third observation: I read a lot of books set in my hometown and about my hometown. Largely because it was Winnipegs 150th anniversary this year. When the Pavement Turns to Sand, The Shadow over Portage and Main, The Art of Ectoplasm: Encounters With Winnipegs Ghost Photographs, More Than Books: The History of Wimmipeg Public Library

Mostly though, what stands out to me in 2024 is not just the diversity of my fiction reads, moving between classical and modern and revisionist takes on classics, it’s that many of these reads that make up my top 10 felt important and monumental, if in different ways.

Here is my top 10 reads in 2024 (in no particular order):

Small Mercies

This might be the least significant pick in terms of relevance and importance, however it’s worth pointing out that it every new release by this author comes with great anticipation because Mystic River, still his best work, is on my all timers shelf. If this doesn’t live up to its brilliance, it nevertheless remains incredibly satisfying to be able to rust an author to engage me with a genre that I don’t typically go for. Propulsive, strong, and thematically interesting. Lots of praise for this one. 

Wild Robot

Picked this one up to prepare for the big screen adaptation. I immediately wished it had been around when I was younger. It asked a lot of the big existential questions I was asking at the time, and explores some complex ideas, using the image of technological progess to explore the connection between humanity and the natural world. Not a problem to call this an instant classic since it already is.

Once a Future Queen

This one took me back. It’s reminiscent of Lewis and Mcdonald, and in fact opened me up to an author who is immersed in that literary world. I love new discoveries, and i also loved this book. Magical realism at its best.

James

Everyone’s talking about it as a 2024 release that is topping lists everywhere, and for good reason. It’s one of a handful of new releases I read this year, and it is the real deal. Fun, inventive, biting. It takes some big swings. As a revisionist take on a familiar classic, ut functions both as inviting nostalgia and challenging commentary, giving it the sort of layers that help the risk pay off. Rather than isolating fans of the classic, it celebrates it while also inviting readers to acknowledge our contemporary lens. 

Winesburg Ohio

“In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.” Beautiful even where it finds things like depression, loneliness, boredom, death, addiction, and unrealized longings. This is a book that doesn’t feel the need to mask over the truth of these realities, instead embracing them as part of what binds us together.

Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde

I love this kind of thing. The simplicity of a fairy tale melded with the profundity of these philosophical questions. And I found many of these stories to be both entertaining and incredibly meaningful, sometimes cynical, sometimes hopeful, always honest. So glad i picked this up from the discount bin

Northwind

The final book Paulsen wrote. It’s a bit messy, but there is a poetic undertone to the prose, bringing together his real life experiences with the pacific northwest coast and Nordic mythologies. It doesn’t always makes sense being blended together, but there is a beauty to the madness. Paulsen’s affection for the natural world and its creatures is an expected and important facet of the story, which is part survival, part adventure, part internal process as our main protagonist makes his way across a rugged landscape. From this flows his philopshical ruminations, weavimg in and out of subtle theological touchpoints.

At its heart, the book seems to be about the movement from life to death to life, with the uncertain nature of this journey with its all its questions and doubts and unknowns being caught in the crosses that nature itself exhibits. The struggle begins, and perhaps ends, with the basic observation that beauty clashes with the honest brutality of the nature we observe. It becomes difficult to imagine, then, what is illusion and what is not, especially when it comes to speaking about good and evil. Even more difficult to imagine life and death having meaning that isn’t constructed over and against this confusion of realities. The presence of Nordic myth gives this an added dimension as well, transporting these same qualities to our ruminations about the gods. If we cannot say the gods are good or evil, then god becomes a distant entity that is both the author and result of this confusion. Equally so with life operating distanced from the gods. Which leaves death as the great leveler. In such a world the brutality is the only true measurable reality. Driven by instinct and evolution and survival. It becomes the only true certainty.

And yet, as Paulsen confronted his own experience of brutality, he became equally compelled by something else- an untamed beauty, as irrational as it was. He found this in the most unlikely of places; in nature where one would expect the brutal reality of this existence to loom largest. This contrasted the humanity where he found beauty to be most hidden. One of the most striking things about his life, something I gleaned from his autobiography, is how it is his encounter in nature and survival that helped clear his confusion about humanity. It gave him a fresh lens to see existence through. And in some real sense that’s the undercurrent running through his final book. If the one true measurable reality is in fact death, then reality must become immeasurable for life to make sense. For me, this is an idea that endeared me as a child and continues to captivate me as a now aging man.

The One and Only series

Finished the final books in the series this year, ending with the fitting and poetic finish in Family. I’m sad to say goodbye, but I’m so glad I took the journey

Brooklyn/Long Island

An all time favorite film paired with the release of a long awaited sequel led me to finally check Brookyln (and its sequel) off the list. It was worth the weight. I’m still mulling over how I feel about the sequel, but Brookkyn brought back the feeling of seeing the film for the first time. Very much familiar to its adaptation with its mix of philosophy, love, immigration, displacement, change, progress and home.

Earth and High Heaven

Particularly absorbing were the characters, filled as they were with nuance and complexity while never betraying that sense of raw, unfiltered dialouge running underneath. It subtly keeps adding natural layers as it goes, giving it the sense of getting to know these strangers on a level befitting friendship. There’s the Canadian context. There is the context of the war. There is the socio-political dynamics of the three central povs- jew, gentile, and french. The way the author brings these dynamics to the surface as a unique exploration of a specific place and time is impressive, and the insight it gives to all three of these dynamics carrying their own sense of isolation in contemporary Montreal was fascinating.

Most important- its a good story. Its entertaining and engaging and meaningful, the perfect balance of crowd pleaser and substance where you can have fun cheering for particular outcomes while growing in the process.

Thornhedge

A fascinating, and very brief at just over 100 pages long, reimagining of the aged fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty. Characters are swapped and reshaped in ways that turn the story upside down and and sideways and backwards, so much so that it makes the unfolding tale nearly impossible to predict. And in so doing, it allows its voice to challenge our conceptions and assumptions at the same time, exploring themes of good and evil, and how such notions frame our tendency to judge the exterior rather than to allow ourselves and hear and see those internal realities that lie hidden beneath the surface, or beyond the thornhedge. As the book suggests, this is just as true of ourselves as it is of the world we live in, both in a material and a spiritual sense.

In this sense, T. Kingfisher has written more of a myth than a fairytale, one that challenges some of our modern trappings and resistance to a reality framed by more than simply one side of the Thornhedge. Myths are important, and necessary, because they challenge our tightly guarded conceptions of reality and epistimology. The minute we decide that this is what reality must be, is the very moment reality, should we be willing to see and hear, bears itself out as something not content to  simply exist within our manufactured restraints. Thus why one of the central characters in this story is a seeker, and the other a protector. It is when these worlds collide that the hedges can be cleared away and greater realities to break in, which brings with it danger and struggle, especially when it comes to our grasp on reality, but also beauty and great reward.

It’s always fun looking through my Letterboxd Pro account around the end of the year. Some relevant data:

My first watch of 2024: Humanist Vampire Seekjng Consenting Suicidal Person (Ariane Loius-Seize), a unique and inventive horror that explores a coming of age story surrounding an existential and moral crisis, unafraid to dig into the difficult subject matter of depression, anxiety and suicide.

My last watch of 2024: The Return (Uberto Pasolini), a slow but methodical examination of the final sections of The Odyssey (perhaps preparing us for the next Nolan feature)

Total Diary Entries: 409

Favorite Stat: Daisy Ridley topped my most watched performances for the year. Why I like this stat- they are all from films released in 2024. I was a considerate fan of the Marsh Kings Daughter, which released back in January, but each subsequent release (Sometimes I Think About  Dying, Young Woman and the Sea, and Magpie) are all operating on a whole other level. Love seeing her find more and more success with leading roles.

What’s also interesting to note is, aside from The Beekeeper (Jason Stathoms over the top thriller) and Argyle (the unfairly maligned action thriller by Matthew Vauhgn, it took almost to March for theaters to finally start screening some new features. January is often a dumping ground, along with catching up to limited release Oscar fare, but this year was actually barren.

One last note: Five of my top ten films of 2024 were seen in the first quarter. Which speaks to the lasting power of those selections.

The Outliers

If I was making a top 20, these would be the titles vying for the back half, starting with Ridley’s Sometimes I Think About Dying. Few films hit such personal notes this year, and for the few technical shortcomimgs that it does have, the journey of the main character felt incredibly validating in all its rawness and honesty. It gave me the freedom, not to be ashamed of my own thoughts.

I would be remiss if I didn’t shout out Alex Garlands uniquely positioned blockbuster, Civil War, still one of the more visually arresting experiences of 2024. Or the intimate and impressive work of Hopkins in One Life, an emotionally arresting holocaust narrative that might feature some of the best work of his career.

There’s a handful of fever driven, energized efforts that really stood out and were all pushing for contention- the thrill ride that is Kneecap, an indie biopic of an international hip hop sensation, the immensely engaging and spirited take on Saturday Night’s historic emergence, and The Apprentice, an inspired examination of the rise of Trump that leaves the facts clear but the interpretation open.

Two films were in my top lists back at the half point- the touching YA adaptation Turtles All The Way Down and the captivating and wonder bearing Riddle of Fire, an old school take on a grown up childhood fantasy story anchored in realism. I’m especially sad to see Riddle of Fire bumped off, as I failed to get around to a rewatch. I think seeing it again could have bumped it up.

And lastly, The Taste of Things remains the other film just outside of my top ten, battling it out with Riddle of Fire and Sometimes I Think of Dying. Such a visceral and poetic visual experience, while Freuds Last Session, capturing a historic and legendary conversation between him and Lewis, remains my pick for underrated and underseen gem along with the biting humor and deep emotionality of Didi.

My Top 10 Films of 2024:

10. Close Your Eyes (Victor Erice)

A haunting and deeply sad exploration of the connections between the moving image (film) and the passage of time. It wonders about life and all its unanswered questions, and even more about death either as a hopeful venture or unfulfilled promise. As a reflective piece of visual poetry its undeniably arresting.

9. Sing Sing (Greg Kwedar)

The story of this film is the astonishing reveal of its casting choices, but beyond this is a film that occupies what is perhaps the opposite terrain from Close Your Eyes- yes, still rooted in the struggle of life, but far more committed to using the relationship between art and life to draw us specifically towards hopefulness and renewal. A tonic for the spirit

8. A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg)

Looking at life once again, this time through the lens of our relationship to technological change, one of the more resonating parts of this film comes in its reflection about how the why of life often matters more than the how. Lest we get to where we are going and forgot and discarded the necessary questions. Can our efforts to make meaning ever be satisfied? Who makes the expectations. Powerful thoughts and thematic interests to consider for anyone looking at the relevance of their personal journies in this world.

7. About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

Another existential crisis, this one leaning deep into its philosophical exercise. Can we claim meaning in this world when even acts of altruism aren’t really true or existent as we see them. Like A Different Man, it wonders about whether we are products of the world or actual agents. Where doe the illusion get drawn within the boundaries of reality, or can we even know such things at all. A heavy film, but its the sort of stuff I eat up.

6. A Complete Unknown (James Mangold)

Immersive performances paired with an inventive biopic structure. I loved its use of music as a dramatic, storytelling device, but even more I loved the simple ideas it was pulling from the iconic characters. A complete film with impressive craft that immerses from start to finish

5. The Promised Land (Nikolaj Arcel)

A memorable and biting revenge drama that just might be a career best for Mads Mikkelson. Essential viewing.

4. Conclave (Edward Berger)

Riveting, a powerful look behind the curtain of institutional religion, at once a robust critique and celebration of its relevance, in case you thought a voting process couldn’t be dramatic, this film is here to prove you wrong.

3. Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)

A deeply astute and powerful reflective on nature and humanities place in it. Not so much about our responsibility towards it, but more about what we find in it- good and evil and the philosophical/theological crisis this represents. It’s a meditation, designed to push back on our perceptions of this world and our need to interpret it

2. Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell (Pham Thien An)

One of the greatest opening sequences of the year, followed up by a lengthy, contemplative exercise in slow cinema. It frames itself around a seeming joke- a devout believer, a skeptic, and an agnostic walk into a film. As such its deeply felt seriousness becomes all the more pronounced, forcing us to wrestle with the tensions and ambiguities of our longings and desires in a world caught between questions and belief.

1. Perfect Days (Wim Wenders)

How to know a person is the question. Observation rather than speech is the proposed answer, drawing us through the subtleties of the details using camera placement and movement. It’s storytelling where we see rather than listen, or listen though seeing into the silence and isolation of unspoken dynamics that make up an identity. To understand the journey of this film you have to look deeper, deep enough for this story to become his and not ours. If we can learn this, it can become a powerful meana of seeing the world as well.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted in this space.

I can’t point to any tragic reason or immediate reason that can explain why. Simply to say, it’s been a season, and if such matters (personal struggle) will always remain contextually relevant in comparison (there is always suffering that will categorize as greater), it is nevertheless real and true to my experience of it.

Life can be difficult. Sometimes near impossible

I created this space in such a season (experiencing severe anxiety and depression when I turned 40) to help me navigate that terrain. As 50 now continues its relentless onset with ever increasing speed (a year and a half away come the new year), I feel the surrealnes settling in. I do not have langauge for this. And yet it sits there shadowing the wealth of anxieties riddling what has been a tough 2024.

I have this new year’s resolution exercise called Rosebud. One of its practices is locating a single word that I want to define the year ahead. My word for 2024 was intent. The broader vision- be intentional about things big and small.

I’ll be honest. I made some movement on the big things, but my neglect of the small things have created a fresh set of big things, all of which now feel expressly out of my control. And I don’t do well in these seasons.

So, what’s ahead? I suppose I want to begin with reclaiming this space. Just with a little necessary reinvention for myself. After all, holding public visibility remains more a mode of accountability than expectation. The space exists so that I can get things in my head onto a page where hopefully it can gain some level of objectivity, with the emphasis being on the stories, be it events, persons, film, books, anything that has informed my world. To this end, I feel the need to let go of the unspoken expectation for this to exist as an extention of my reading and watching logs. Less posts, more intentionally when it comes to ongoing reflection. I’m hoping this can help me reclaim some of what this past year has stolen.

I also want to continue to pressure myself to keep going at writing my own story, the story of my life. I recently purchased a couple guide books to help ignite that flame once again.

We will see how this goes. As the wonderful animated film, Memoirs of a Snail, so wonderfully reminded us, life must be understood backwards, but it can only be lived forwards. A familiar refrain that never loses its power.

Reading Journal 2024: The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles To Heal Society and Ourselves

Author: Alexandra Hudson

“Politeness is easy. Civility requires effort.”
– Alexandra Hudson (The Soul of Civility)

In her book exploring the idea of civility as a healing practice, Hudson points out the problem of definitions. Words have origins, but definitions are not static. They change over time based on culture and context.

Such is the case with the words polite and civil, two distinct words that have become synonymous in western culture. Look them up in the dictionary, Hudson suggests, and you will notice that both words are caught in a circular force of meaning. Civil is defined as polite, and polite is defined as simple, a fact that says more about our present culture than the words themselves.

So what if one believes that civility is distinct from politeness, and that recovering this distinctiveness is crucial and necessary to growing as a society precisely because politeness is part of the problem? How does one navigate the act of trying to recover a words definition while simultaneously redefining it against its shared usage in our present context? You dedicate a whole book to establishing a fresh foundation to work from.

So where do we locate the differences between politeness:
1. Politeness is focused on externals and actions. Civility is based internally on the fundamental values underlying discourse and social function. The foundation of civility is the assumed dignity of the other.
2. Politeness is a functional tool which can be “weaponized to silence and suppress disagreement.” Civility cannot be weaponized because it puts the assumed dignity of the other at the center rather than the disagreement
3. Politeness is defined in its Latin origins as polishing or making smooth, which is all about diminishing disagreements. It adheres to the rules of a given social order. This is how politeness can be used to seek power and control over the other. Civility is defined in its Latin origin as the status, conduct, and character beffiting a citizen. It is about a “general attitude toward life WITH others.”
4. Politeness seeks validation, civility validates
5. Politeness ignores and diminishes, civility grapples with and respects
6. Politeness thrives on creating bubbles and avoiding discourse. Civility demands connectiveness, communication and discourse across differences, something we’ve lost the ability to do.
7. Politeness is about the immediate. Civility takes time and investment.
8. Politeness is about establishing status. Civility is about defining and locating our humanness.
9. Politeness is about law and order. Civility is about philosophy and ethics.

These differences matter precisely because “the human condition is a paradox defined by greatness and wretchedness.” As Hudson notes, “We each lead interdependent and multidimensional lives, but often deny it. We underestimate how much our negative actions can affect people for the worse, and how positive actions can affect people for the better.”

For as good and insightful and important as all of this is, it is on this last point that the book ends up falling a bit short when it comes to the force of its argumen and its aims. On the final page of the book she asserts that “we are more in control of our emotions- and of our responses to our emotions- than we realize. A romanticized notion to be sure, but it’s a claim that requires a foundation, a prior assumption about the nature of reality, life, self, the will, and humanity that is able to both assert and qualify this statement as one that is able to fairly assume both responsibility and obligation. The problem is that her attempts to establish a foundation aren’t very strong. Not coincidentally, these words belong to a final chapter called misplaced meaning and forgiveness, where the assumptions about responsibility and obligations towards civilly as a virtue are perhaps at their most loftiest. The words “we must” ring out in relationship to reclaiming “pursuits and values” that bring us joy and give our lives meaning. Why? Because, as it is outlined, “democracy, our freedom, and human flourishing depend on this.”  That’s a lot of assumptions to make without doing the necessary work to demonstrate the givenness of these things.

She says a few times over that civility is the basic respect we are owed “by virtue of our shared dignity and equal moral worth as human beings.” She also states that “community and relationship are the highest end of the human experience.” She talks about civility having a transcendent quality that gives it its authority over our lives (p306). Gives it its soul, it’s agency if you will, over us and for us to embody. Over and over again she anchors the problem using sharp binaries built from the basic notion that we are self driven beings, a fact which clash with our aocial natures. Self love, or love of self, exists as the driving nature of our existence and our survival, but when we exist together it creates a tension that then carries with it the natural embededness of chaos and order as states in contest. Civility seeks order within the chaos of our love of self by its nature, and yet nature sees chaos as necessary to order, a conundrum she leaves quietly to the side. All of the sharply drawn binaries fit into this basic function of reality-With such vigor in fact that it is percieved to be able to lay claim to the myriad of assumptions layed out above that are necessary to its premise without appealing to the demands of reason and rational argumentation. We can just say that humanity is owed something and that humanity’s inherent value is enough to obligate us towards civility, and let that be it’s own evidence.

At one point she says that “civility… requires us to make the sacrifices necessary for society and civilization.” Why though, and to what end? And what happens when history tells us this is not how rhe world works? How nature works? How order works? What happens when upholding this romanticized ideal forces us to ignore reason and logic? Ignore reality? What then brings in that stated responsibility and obligation?

She does a curious thing anchoring this book in the first chapter in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Not only because she attempts to ignore its claims to the transcendent realities operating in the background of its story in favor of reducing it fo metaphorical and purely functional readings (as to say hey, look at what’s written into our evolutionary history ), but also because she appeals equally and in the same way to the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. What happens when you sit these stories side by side and you are forced fo attend for their differences? She just pretends like this doesn’t exist, reappropriating the meaning of both stories in service of her own appeal to different transcendent virtues and aims. She treats the story of Jesus similarly, trying to use his life, absent of its own narrative context, as an example of moral obligation to be civil in action. Why? She doesn’t qualify any of it. By saying that politeness is a function and civility is a value that gives meaning to our actions, she leaves herself beholden to navigating the functionality of civility, which is what this book actually does, by freely imposing a transcendent quality on to something that by its essence is not this. There is no good reason why civility should have more authority than politeness, it is just assumed to be so. This gets reinforced by stripping her view of reality of its ability to appeal to actual transcendent qualities.

This all becomes a muddled mess of an argument, even though there is lots of good to take away from it in parts and sections, especially if you have a worldview that is able to make room for it. Civility, within her worldview, isn’t any less self concerned than politeness when you actually look at what it is. Civility cannot manage and adhere to progress without abandoning and subverting its own premises when it needs to. Things like equality and the assumed dignity of all humans are illusions at best. They are things that demand sacrificing m these very values in order to be achieved in the first place. A thriving society does not need an obligation to globalization, and in fact arguably thrives better without it. The quakitative harshness of entropy is ordered nature by law, and to arrive at the assumptions Hudson wants to make about civility she must appeal to a higher order in order to subvert it. To make this about something other than matters of survival and thriving, both of which are self serving aims by their nature, she needs to do the work of building an actual foundation that can allow civility to actually gain its agency over our lives. Otherwise it’s just nature doing its thing, and we function within that according to our illusions of meaning. It all sounds nice, and it might even make me feel and function better according to the natural order of things to be more civil to a degree, but it’s far from making any rational claims about reality or given values. Just talk to someone who feels like revolution and resistance is needed, the primary markers of that thing we call democracy, and you’ll see how fleeting civility as a value can be. Just look at the nature of the systems and structures that define our civilizations and you’ll see how inconsistent civility as a value can be. Look at the construct of the self and you’ll see how shaky civility as a value can be. It might sound nice and quaint to give it a transcendent quality, but life will have its way of exposing that pretty quickly if we are resting everythung in a materialist viewpoint 

In his book Paul and the Resurrection of Israel, scholar Jason Staples points out a deeply entrenched tendency to fly over Romans 1 and 2 on our way to Romans 3. The “our” in this picture is much of the theological traditions of the west. Why do we do this? Because we convinced ourselves that the Scriptures prop up the Law as a way to get to grace. The Law is what we thought saved us, while grace is what does save us. But Romans 1 and 2 pose a real problem to this way of thinking, thus we have trained ourselves to do a fly over so as to avoid the imposition of its claims about the Law.

A couple years back I did an extensive deep dive/study of Paul’s letter to the Roman churches. So many theological issues/disagreements stem from this letter, and it is the most widely read, discussed, debated, studied letter in the NT for the ways we have come to see it as central to our understanding of salvation. In that process I came to recognize how much of the debate also hinges on our understanding of who the audience of the letter is. Is it written to Jews judging gentile inclusion or the gentile world? Gentile converts to Judaism judging the uncircumcised converts? Is it a letter to humanity in general?

Not coincidentally, one of the reasons for the flyover of Romans 1 and 2 seems to be because those chapters tend to make it much more difficult to uphold our theories regarding the audience. The virtual whiplash that occurs when trying to make sense of the harsh nature of Romans 1 and 2, especially when the audience seems to shift multiple times, can be disconcerting to say the least. That’s at least one reason why professor Scott McKnight wrote an entire book about reading Romans backwards rather than forwards, as it seems far easier to at least approach those first two chapters if we have the seemingly far clearer context of its final chapters in tow (ironically chapters that tend to get bypassed and ignored altogether in our rush to prop up Romans 3-9, or even 3-11.

One of the aims of Staples book is to take the progressions of the new perspective relating to our understanding of Law and Grace, stemming from Sanders and well beyond, and point out how, for as much as that has been on the right track, even those necessary reformulations have a tendency to ignore or keep a distance from the real implications of their own conclusions. Staples thesis has been that this is largely because of an unwillingness to really dial down on the terms Israel and Jew as having distinct definitions and reference points within scripture. Failing to recognize this keeps our attempts to reclaim the meaning of Law and Grace (or Law and Gospel) in its world from actually capturing that world’s larger concern for the story of Israel as a covenantal expression set within Exodus and Exile.

How does this relate to chapters 1 and 2 of Romans for Staples? What stood out for me in his chapter called The Israel Problem and The Gentiles (Chapter 3) is the way he brings all the diverging viewpoints together by reshaping the focus of those first two chapters back on to a universal, human concern, simply with a different vantage point in tow (the story of Israel). He is the only scholar I have come across to point out that Paul’s use of the interlocutor (an imagined opponent) is not yet established or in play in these early chapters, and how this becomes important for seeing the way his argument establishes it later on in direct relationship to the audience he is addressing. In other words, Romans 1 and 2 is not addressing gentile idolatry but Israel’s idolatry directly relating to the golden calf. There is no imagined opponent in chapters 1 and 2.

Why is this important? Because recognizing this point of focus allows the reader to follow Paul’s argument as he uses that story of idolatry to then “connect Israel’s sin with Adam’s sin.” This establishes a “pattern” that is able to then parallel the golden calf with Israel’s present exile and the ensuing new covenant emphasis that we find in the prophets. More importantly, by recognizing how the term Israel differs from the term Jew, we can see how Paul’s addressing of a Jewish audience relates to the story of Israel as one in which the tribes have been scattered amongst the gentile world and to which the covenant promise hinges on its restoration. This becomes the backdrop through which Paul is addressing a specific Jewish concern in relationship to the problem of gentile inclusion, and indeed salvation.

As Staples points out, the “therefore” in 2:1 (therefore you have no excuse, every human who judges) is the third in a final series of therefores that bind chapter 1 and 2 together. Meaning, “if one agrees with preceding discourse, then no one stands apart from God’s judgment.” We should not though, as readers, assume this universal human focus is somehow doing away with the story of Israel as necessary to making this point. His point is ultimately summed up in the climatic proclamation, “in this way all Israel will be saved.” Not a reconstituted or spiritualized Israel, but the story of Israel. The promise of the Law, or covenant, being fulfilled in Jesus according to its restated application (new covenant language) in the face of exile in the second temple period. In other words, Paul is engaging in exegesis. When Paul goes on to distinguish between those between Adam and Moses and those after Moses he is leaning on this established parallel between Israel’s sin and Adam’s sin to make his point to his Jewish audience, gentile converts or not, that the revelation, or knowledge of God, is found in the revelation of Torah, now fulfilled in Christ. Paul is not disagreeing with the Jewish conception of God and their relationship to the Law (the story of Israel), rather he is finding in that story the necessary grounds for his proclamation of the Gospel (the grace gift of Jesus), a Gospel that sees salvation expressed in the restoration of Israel’s story, a salvation that is for the sake of the world. First to the Jew (or Judeans), precisely because their expectations hinge on the salvation of Israel, and then to the Gentile, as the world’s salvation depends on the same story.

What often happens is modern readers collapse the notion of a shared, universal appeal to Gods impartial justice in the condemnation of Death and Evil with God’s saving act. The story of Israel thus becomes a scapegoat for grace trumping the Law, with Jews being made synonymous with Israel and occupying the crosshairs of the subsequent enemy fire. In reality, Paul’s argument for impartial justice hinges on upholding and understanding the uniquess of the Law as telling the story of Israel in both its idolatry and subsequent exiles, and in its salvation (fulfillment). Appeals to knowledge of this story relate directly to doing or living this story, but Israel’s knowledge, and subsequently the Jews knowledge of the story of Israel and the story of their covenantal failure, is not synonymous with God’s impartial justice of Death and Evil, rather it is a witness to God’s saving act.

Film Journal 2024: Cottontail
Directed by Patrick Dickinson

A simple but powerful examination of family, mostly told through the lens of a solitary aging man who, in the aftermath of losing his wife, stands in danger of losing his son.

The father-son dynamic is a significant part of the  culturally rooted narrative, navigating social expectations, honor-shame systems, family responsibilities. But even then, it is also a universal story about grief, loss, estrangement and forgiveness, all which carry this potent sense of intimacy, empathy and awareness.

The fact that it taps into such real emotions without ever becoming sentimental or forced is a testament to the sensitive hand behind the camera and the embodied performances in front of it.

Film Journal 2024: The Devil’s Bath
Directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala

And I thought Goodnight Mommy took things to the next level. I mean it did, but this dark, harrowing follow up after the less acclaimed The Lodge is truly oppressive.

Which might not sound appealing, but as a viewing experience it is unsettling in the best kind of way. It’s horror in the sense of atmosphere and tone, while underneath it is a gorgeous period piece and historical drama rich in the kind of tragedy one might expect from a community soaked in superstitions, social hierarchies and corrupted religious powers. Of the sort that would make Eggers thrilled.

There are multiple layered themes at play that all get embodied in the character if a tortured wife, played to perfection by Anja Plaschg, who is forced to wrestle with the demons that surround her, a battle that never seems hers to win, especially as we watch her gradual decent into despair, grief and madness. It’s a character arc that leaves its mark, especially with that jaw dropping final 20 minutes. The interconnected themes of suicide, sin, confession, forgiveness, and salvation are especially poignant.

Reading Journal 2024
Brooklyn
Author: Colm Tóibín

Fell in love with the movie, got drawn to the book a while ago before it got lost in my ever growing TBR list. This years release of a sequel, Long Island, inspired me to pick it up.

Loved a good deal about this book, especially its strong sense of place. It was interesting reading the thematic push and pull of the film, the element that had captured me most fully, back into the minds of these characters. As is common to these types of stories we get a lot of descriptive taking place inside the mind of the characters, in this case Ellis. In some ways it redirects the on-screen journey, such as the poetic rendering of a life defined by these competing allegiances to place and person tha we find in the film, to something more internal, which taken together form an appeal to the transcendent, most notably aware in the adaptation, as it seeks after something that can help define and determine the nature of the decisions in question in this story.

The book narrows in more specifically on the uncertainty of these decisions and choices in the moment. The book doesn’t take the same license in imagining a grander story as the film does, but such an interpretive move is embedded in the text all the same, capturing the rich character journey of someone caught between space and time amidst those competing allegiances and concerns, with both central figures in Ellis’ life representing Ireland and America, belonging and becoming. In this sense it’s not ultimately about the decisions and choices, but rather finding and locating the transcendent value that runs underneath.

Long Island
Colm Tóibín

I’m still parsing out how I feel about this sequel, which is probably a sign of the books overall strength as a literary work. It feels very different from Brooklyn, and yet it is designed to mirror that story in very specific ways at the same time, just from a different perspective.

Whereas Brooklyn spends time establishing its characters and its sense of place, Long Island hits the ground running. If Brooklyn imagined a grander narrative behind the particular tensions Ellis is navigating, tensions that demand certain decisions and choices to be made, Long Island dials much more firmly in on functional reality of her life as it is. In the first few pages we are plunged into a point of crisis regarding the choices she made in Brooklyn, and informed of a planned trip back to Ireland that, as the text makes clear, she now wants to utilize as a means of reflecting on all her past choices and potential regrets. In a very real sense this sequel is playing the events in Brooklyn backwards, just with years of assumed experiences now in tow. This forces her to wrestle with similar tensions, just with different questions and awareness this time around.

One of the things I’m still dwelling on in my assessment of this sequel is the way it defines the world around Ellis in concrete ways, especially when it comes to the people who occupy it. Whereas part of what made Brooklyn compelling was that all the characters were nuanced and complex, certain characters and realities here are not complex at all. It is easy to know exactly how the book wants us to feel about certain elements of the existing tension, which might actually undercut the tension altogether.

What gives me pause though is that I think what the author was doing was using the familiar construct of the first book as a mirror, but one that is meant to point us to a fresh tension, not the same one. It wants to make concrete statements about certain characters so that we might turn our attention to different ones. Along with this, the book flips Brooklyn around by switching who it is we spend the majority of our time with in terms of the two central love intersts of the first book.

I felt this, even as I also resisted some of that intentional shifting in the stories focus. There are other characters that emerge here in more defined ways, and that makes the focus of the story different. Add to this the fact that it is a different character this time around carrying that tension between life in Ireland and life in America, thus allowing Ellis’ own wrestling to push further into the realm of these other dynamics. Its subtle, and I missed experiencing much of that in the moment thanks to being locked in to the story from Brooklyn, but I do think that affords this a unique quality as a sequel. All the more so when you get to the unresolved ending (trigger warnings for those whom are bothered by that).

Overall I liked this. It is more simple, its an easy and breezy read, its more narrowed, but in that I think it brings some thought provoking aspects to the larger story that make it even more interesting, especially if it keeps moving forward (it feels like it will).

Film Journal 2024: Fly Me To The Moon
Directed by Greg Berlanti

Of the two films dealing with the subject of space that released this week (the other one being Space Cadet) only one of them lands the shuttle, and that would be this charming and creative crowd pleaser. If Space Cadet came dangerously close to making a mockery out of the entire NASA enterprise, the most brilliant aspect of Fly Me to the Moon, a film that also fuses equal parts comedy, parody, and serious drama/themes, is the way it uses the whole advertising agent tasked with selling the space race to a nation plagued by world conflicts and war and political divide, to quietly sell us as viewers on the idea as well. This is a love letter to the idea of space exploration as a great unifier, even as it also functions as a clever riff on the “fake moon landing” conspiracies and, in its most simplest form, a charming and hugely entertaining rom-com built off the chemistry of its two effortlessly charismatic leads (Johannson and Tatum).

The screenplay also pops with an energy befitting the tension filled fictional take on the lead up to Apollo 11, as does the soundtrack and the period setting.

I will say, as a Canadian I feel like even though I’m only an hour from the southern border, I’m also occupying a different reality that feels worlds away from this sort of overt patriotism, no matter how much it wants to sell this as “America fighting on behalf of the world.” But that certainly doesn’t leave me immune to the sentiments this is trying to evoke on an emotional level, and part of what this film does super well is balanced the bigger stakes of getting these men to the moon with the intimacy of the interpersonal drama on the ground. That I can connect to, and it is really this element that forms the lens for zooming further out to bigger realities and bigger questions, including one of the dominant themes regarding the nature of truth and lies.

As Johannsons character notes at one point, no one can believe the truth and it would still be true, and everyone can believe a lie and it would still be a lie. And yet the real point of concern cuts through this, asking whether there is something that matters more than an appeal to simple factual truth. This question is posed in light of Johannsons character using manipulation and lies to make the dream of space become a reality, suggesting that it is the power of illusion that gives people meaning and that even lies can serve a greater value. This film dares to push that further yet, paralleling the simple nature of relationships and the value of endeavors like space exploration as it wonders about the tension that exists between illusion and conviction. Does it matter that people believe the moon landing was real or fake, or does it matter that it happened? Does it matter that facts are true or that feelings and outcomes are true? What is the driving force of either our lives or our greater human pursuits in this sense?

These are strong and important philosophical observations, and I think the films willingness to leave room for one to experience both a lack or resolution and a clear resolution, depending on how we view the larger story from our personal vantage point, helps to elevate this to another level.

“I will not go up in your midst, because you are a stiff-necked people, and I might destroy you on the way.”
– Exodus 33:3

“Due to Israel’s sin with the golden calf, the earlier promise of Gods presence to guide Israel on her way, once the very expression of his blessing, has now become the instrument of his judgment. But that God would consent to withdraw his presence is also an ironic expression of his long-suffering grace. Given the “stiff-necked” nature of the nation, Gods withdrawal of his presence from Israel’s midst is not only part of his judgment upon the people for their sin (32:34), but also a necessary act of divine mercy which makes it possible for Israel to continue on as a people.”
– Scott Hafemann

“From this point forward, Israel would only encounter God’s glory through a veil- whether that be the one covering Moses’ face, the one in the tabernacle, or (Paul argues by extension in 2 Cor 3:14-15) the “letter” or written “Moses”. The progression in 2 Cor 3 from Moses the lawgiver to “Moses” as a metonymy for the “letter” or written Torah allows Paul to focus his critique on the mediated nature of the “old covenant” (3:14) without criticizing the Torah itself.”
– Jason A. Staples (Paul and the Ressurection of Israel)

Let this poor heart be your mountain
be your mountain
the mountain where you dwell, O Lord
Yes, let this poor heart be your mountain
be your mountain
the mountain where you dwell, O Lord
and let this hunger become a pathway
become a pathway
that brings you here to me, O Lord
Yes, let this hunger become a pathway
become a pathway
that brings you here to me, O Lord

Fire, fall down
Thunder, surround
Glory, come down
Fire, fall down
Thunder, surround
Glory, come down

Let this longing become a love song
become a love song
that you teach my heart to sing, O Lord
Yes, let this longing become a love song
become a love song
that you teach my heart to sing, O Lord
Let this desire become a fire
become a fire
burning deep and bright in me, O Lord
Yes, let this desire become a fire
become a fire
burning deep and bright in me, O Lord
– Brother Isaiah (Holy Hunger)

Just as i came to read the above passages in Staples book, I found myself simultaneously asking God to teach me what it means to reconcile the veiling with the ensuing revelation of the unveiling of God in Jesus in the Judeo-Christian story, and this song by Brother Isaiah came on my spotify shuffle.

Let this poor heart
Let this longing
Let this desire

I wonder about the ways in which conservative Christians, driven to protect all of the things they see as necessary to claiming Gods presence in our lives and in this world, and progressive Christians, driven to do away with the many things they believe get in the way of seeing Gods presence in our lives and in this world, can equally find themselves standing apart from the story of Torah by way of making it either an enemy or an antiquated evil, a reflection of things that our conservative or progressive ideolgies have superseded in their grasp on the truth

I say this as someone who has stood in both of these polarized camps and operated in the same tendencies. I say this as someone who also found myself once intrinsically stuck without a real way to anchor Gods presence in my life and in this world. As someone for whom “the story” had ceased being told and could no longer be told because of the ways the new waged this necessary war against the old. I found myself unable to get back to Jesus, either through those conservative trenches or that progressive battlefield.

Some time ago I came to this realization through a time of crying out to god to “show” or unveil that seemingly absent glory once again- to be drawn back to (or simply to) the “story” of God is to be drawn into a story that speaks first and most completely to the whole of creation. Without this creation-new creation story there is no revelation or unveiling.

It is through this story that we arrive then at the story of Israel, the people through whom God would reveal this glory in its fullness. Thus, how we see the story of Israel becomes our lens for seeing the story of creation-new creation, and subsequently how we see ourselves in relationship to creation. What god does in the veiling becomes an equal judgment of the enslaving Powers of Sin and Death that reign over creation, and a divine mercy for this movement towards new creation, or what the scriptures call the story of salvation.

What do we find in this story when it is allowed it to speak?
– we find the freedom to see the imagery of the garden (dwelling with God) and the wilderness (gods removal of his presence) as both a judgment and a grace note, both of which find their resolution in the giving of the spirit to once again dwell in the whole of the creation
– we find the condemnation not of Gods good creation, or the other, but of the Powers of Sin and Death
– we find the freedom to see death and suffering as fundamentally opposed to life and transformation
– we find the freedom to lay claim to the fulfilled promise that God not only will make all things new through the establishing of his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, but has made all things new through the establishing of the kingdom in the here and now. As Staples puts it, “when Paul refers to the “curse of the Torah,” he is referring to death… the blessing, on the other hand, is equated with life… Unfortinately, modern readers frequently overlook that for Paul, like his Jewish predecessors and contemporaries, death is not solely an individual problem but a corporate one.”
– we find the freedom to locate evil as the antithesis of love, finding in the story of the veiling a fundamental problem of idolatry, not moral failings. If Gods life defining and life giving presence cannot coexist with Sin and Death, then the unveiling must come with the removal of these things, which is exactly what the ancients understood the blood (which was life not death, a grace gift not a necessary killing) to do- it has the power, in the face of that which opposes god (Death) to remove the pollution of Sin and Death from the creation space precisely because it is where life resides, a life that, through the ritual practice of gift giving sacrifice (of which death and killing do not belong) resides with god through the fire, or the burning.
– we find the freedom to hope and to wonder in a world still burdened under the reality of Sin and Death. In the story of Torah righteousness is not moral perfection but resurrection reality. It continually points to that which we can claim as truth in the unveiling (jesus and the spirit) even as we wait in anticipation for its completion- a transformed creation space.

Be a mountain
Be a love song
Become a fire

Because the unveiling of gods presence has happened for the sake of gods good creation.