Paul’s letter to the Philippians has been a favorite of mine ever since I was a child. I was rerreading a portion of it this morning, my childhood long behind me, and jotting down some thoughts that maybe reframe how this letter continues to speak to me today:
4 Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I say, rejoice! 5 Let everyone see your gentleness. The Lord is near! 6 Do not be anxious about anything. Instead, in every situation, through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, tell your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds[e] in Christ Jesus.
Philippians 4:4-9
I noted how the call to rejoice needs to be repeated? (4:4) Why is that? Perhaps because our default is to question such an act when things don’t seem or feel rejoice-worthy. The older I get the more this needs to be repeated
Maybe rejoice-worthy is a better translation than praiseworthy in 4:8. Rejoice in Greek is chairo, and indicates something that we are, or to be someone with a particular posture and who abides in a particular way that reflects joy and trust. The Greek for praiseworthy is epainos euphemos. This digs underneath the what of what we are called to be (rejoicers) and names that particular posture as good. Thus these two words are intimately connected, Locating the source of our being in that which is true and beautuful
To rejoice is to see that the Lord is near, nearness is an invitation to prayer, prayer is an invitation to give thanks. (4:6)
Nouwen, Willard, Bates, Wright, Gorman, McKnight, Gaventa, Rutledge. These are just some of the names at the forefront of a conversation about the word faith that has been going on over the last 15 or so years. There has been a movement to reclaim the heart of the word pistis as trust or allegiance. Thus to pray is also an appeal to trust (as I heard Tyler Staton put it in a recent sermon). Trust is an active word. It is also a responsive word. Thus it is neither blindly rendered nor removed from the art of rejoicing. It binds us in allegiance to that which is named true and beautiful, to the one who has come near.
Picking up Ryan G Dunns Theology of Horror: The Hidden Depths of Popular Films seemed an obvious fit for spooky season. Less obvious would be pairing it with Paul J. Schutz’s A Theology of Flouishing.
There were two portions of Schutz’s introduction that helped solidify this as a helpful conversation partner with a theology of horror. The first comes in his observation of the potential clarity that comes from placing a theology of flourishing as a starting point and center of gravity for our theological practice and outlook.
“Only by taking seriously the suffering, violence and degredation that so often characterize creaturely life can Christians come to authentic hope that moves us to action.”
For Schutz, a theology of flourishing invokes a “foretaste” of the fulfillment that informs our hope, affording us a logical “basis for standing in solidarity with all creation in the here and now.”
In other words, if a theology of horror is the naming of the problem, a theology of flourishing is the naming of the hope. Schutz intuitively understands that at the root of taking suffering seriously is the necessary naming of that which opposes Life, which is the naming of Death. If we cannot name Death as antithetical to Life, we cannot name Life. To act in a world held captive to Death is to act in a way that finds the signposts of the fullness of life breaking into this reality. Reshaping this reality. Helping us to distinguish between the horror and the hope.
As Shutz puts it, “Flourishing is in fact consituent of a proper understanding of salvation.” (p xxvii)
In my morning service this Sunday morning this was made more evident in the passage being reflected on in the homily. We’ve been working through the letter of 1 Peter, Here the pastor evoked the analogy of a horror movie to exercise his point regarding the authors conviction of the hope that shapes a life lived in the reality of a struggling creation. He noted one of the paradigms of the thought process made evident in this letter is one of the same markings that informs the tropes of the horror movie (or story): the penchant to seperate and go our own way when faced with the horrors. This is what leads to the trope being formed.
But of course all tropes are anchored in a truism. In the life of the Church, then, 1 Peter is intently concerned with the ways in which outside pressures result in a fracturing body. This is the natural reaction that results from our inherent anxiety and fear. If the call is towards unity rather than division, at the root of this is the difficulty we all have with giving those fears and anxieties over to God. Why is this difficult? Because our natural tendency is to want to regain control in the face of uncertainty and choas and disorder. All coincidentally markers of that larger thing the ancients called Death. In 1 Peter this is the enemy that prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour (4:8). Resistance begins with undestanding the shared reality of the whole.
Shutz applies this same though to the whole of creation, finding in this theology of flourishing the further question of a theology of participation. or participationist theology. What does it mean for the potential to exist for participation either in the horror or the hope? Or, as Schult also puts it:
What does it mean to live? What does it mean to experience the fullness of life- in a word, to flouish.
It is only when we recognize that we share this reality with the whole of creation that we can begin to find ourselves as particiapants in this storied tension. A creation enslaved to the Powers of Death. A Gospel that liberates through the proclomation of Death’s defeat. Not to escape this world but to restore it. This is what it means to be a participant of a greater hope that casts out fear. To live as those with shared anxieties and yet also as those who’s anxieties have been placed on the one who carries them to the cross and reforms them in the resurrection.
“The Lord spoke to Moses “in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tent of meeting, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they had come out of of the land of Egypt, saying, “Take a census…” (Num 1:1-2)
I’ve been working my way through a new commentary on the book of Numbers by Peter Altmann, which has been really great thus far. A number of weeks ago I found myself jotting down some observations and notes in this space that I’ve finally found time to come back around to. And in the process I came across an old post sitting in my drafts on Numbers that I never published or did anything with. Much of it was based on a Jewish commentary I had worked through years ago from Rabbi Glenn.
As Altmann notes, on a narrative level Numbers chapter 1 picks up from Leviticus 10;16:1 and Exodus 40, following the group that leaves Sinai. In Numbers, God speaks in the desert within the tabernacle, not on the mountain, placing the tabernacle at the center of the story through its depiction of the centralization of this people in the desert. This places Numbers “along the way” and represents a qualitative difference to the method of Gods speaking.
Further, he exposits the notion of the census, which in the ancient world is present either in connection to military campaigns or to the raising of taxes or a labour force, often for a building project. In the case of Numbers the image being evoked is that of a sacred army on a campaign. In the case of Israel however it contains a theological purpoose that explicity acts and functions in opposition to the idea of Empire. Having left Egypt and finding the people “along the way,” the book intentionally connects the generation that exited Egypt at Sinai witth the generation after (the descendants of this group). The numbers act symbolically in a way that binds these two groupings together through a singular story. Those in chapter 1 die in the desert after their refusal to take the land, and those in the second is about how this story moves forward towards “the transformation of the community.” Altmann describes this as a liberated community becomming a sacral congregation on pilgrimage with the Divine royal tent (the tabernacle). Hence why, like the book of Leviticus, we find the imagery of the centralization of this community beginning with the organization of the camp around the tabernacle, with Judah being placed closest to the tent and the tents symbolic of the scattered nations being placed furthest away.
This positioning becomes important when the Tribes are named and given the symbolic nature of the 12, which we can see being creatively drawn out for a theological purpose of drawing readers towards the hopeful promise of transformation, which begins with Israel and flows out into the whole, all with the express interest in God’s defeat of the Empire, an image that in Israel’s story is made synonymous with the serpents seed of Genesis 1-4. The organization of the camp matches the building of the tabernacle, and the building of the tabernacle matches the narrative of Genesis 1-4. Even the census itself is divided into 12 parts, drawing the reader into the same imagery. As an aside, this becomes a stepping off point into the relevance of the Levites and the firstborn, which occupies prominant space in the early chapters.
For Rabbi Glenn, he sees Numbers as a travelogue. It is both about looking forward and looking back, which fits with Altmann’s connecting of the census with the bringing together of this generational gap “along the way” of this singular story. What I especially liked about how Glenn expresses this journey is the way he connects the liberative act of the Exodus with the necessary movement into the desert. This is a lengthy quote, but I love how it emphasizes the nature of this journey as one that reaches “beyond history” and makes the unseen seen in this concept of the spoken Word:
The Hebrew word midbar, wilderness, has the same root as the word dabar/davar, meaning “word” or “thing.” It has the same letters as medabber, “speaking.” It is in the wilderness that the Israelites hear revelation, the word or speaking of G-d.
Fundamental to Judaism is the belief that G-d cannot be seen. For every ancient faith but one, the gods were present in the phenomena of nature: the sun, the stars, the sky, the sea. They were visible; things seen. In Israel a revolutionary idea reached expression, that G-d was beyond nature: When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, The moon and the stars which you have set in place . . .The vast universe is no more than the work of G-d’s fingers. Everything we can see is not G-d but merely the work of G-d. Hence the repeated prohibitions in Judaism against making an image or icon. To Judaism, the idea that G-d is visible is idolatry. G-d is beyond the totality of things seen.
But how then can He be perceived? In Judaism for the first time revelation becomes a problem. For every other culture, revelation is self-evident. Where are the gods? All around us. In polytheism, the gods are close. In Judaism, G-d – vast beyond our imagining – would seem to be infinitely distant. The answer Judaism gave was beautiful and world-transforming. G-d who transcends nature is close, because He exists not in things seen, but in words heard…
In the great river lowlands where civilization began (the Tigris-Euphrates and the Nile) the eye is captivated by the shifting scenes of nature; in cities by the works of man – art and architecture. Only in the emptiness of the wilderness is the eye subordinate to the ear. Only in the silence of the desert, can the sound beneath sound be heard: In Hebrew thought, Book and Desert are contingent upon one another. When G-d revealed himself to Moses and charged him with the task of freeing the Hebrews, terms such as ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ were not used. The idea of emancipation from bondage is expressed as “going on a three days’ journey into the desert, to sacrifice to G-d our Lord,” (Ex. 3: 19; 5:3) as if G-d could not be apprehended without this initial journey into the desert. (Jose Faur, Golden Doves with Silver Dots) Or as Edmond Jabes puts it: The word cannot dwell except in the silence of other words. To speak is, accordingly, to lean on a metaphor of the desert, a space of dust or ashes, where the triumphant word is offered in her unrestricted nudity. (Du Desert au Livre)
The historian Eric Voegelin sees this as fundamental to the discovery by the Israelites of a completely new form of spirituality: If nothing had happened but a lucky escape from the range of Egyptian power, there only would have been a few more nomadic tribes roaming the border zone between the Fertile Crescent and the desert proper, eking out a meagre living with the aid of part-time agriculture. But the desert was only a station on the way, not the goal; for in the desert the tribes found their G-d. They entered into a covenant with him, and thereby became his people . . .
When we undertake the exodus and wander into the world, in order to found a new society elsewhere, we discover the world as the Desert. The flight leads nowhere, until we stop in order to find our bearings beyond the world. When the world has become Desert, man is at last in the solitude in which he can hear thunderingly the voice of the spirit that with its urgent whispering has already driven and rescued him from Sheol [the domain of death]. In the Desert G-d spoke to the leader and his tribes; in the desert, by listening to the voice, by accepting its offer, and by submitting to its command, they had at last reached life and became the people chosen by G-d…
The way to the Holy Land lies through the wilderness. It is there that the Israelites learned what it is to build a society that will be the anti-type of Egypt, not an empire built on power, but a society of individuals of equal dignity under the sovereignty of G-d. An impossible task? Certainly not an easy one. But to quote Eric Voegelin again: “What emerged from the alembic of the Desert was not a people like the Egyptians or Babylonians, that Canaanites or Philistines, the Hittites or Arameans, but a new genus of society, set off from the civilizations of the age by the Divine choice. It was a people that moved on the historical scene while living toward a goal beyond history. “
What’s so fascinating to me here is this image of a people delivered from the enslaving Powers in order to enter into the world as a liberated people. And yet this “liberation” is not described as being towards the politics of the world, it is defined as a journey into the desert where they are expressely in the world but also not of it. What’s interesting to point out is, as per Altmann’s mention of Stubbs in his commentary on chapter 2, the human counting of one’s people or army actually indicates a transgressing of God’s initial desire and authority and knowledge. This is so easy to miss, and yet its so crucial to how this story is being told. Even here in the centralization of a people set apart in the desert we find two parallel and opposing forces at work: to bind ones self to the politics of Empire (to be like the world) or to bind ones self to the voice of God. This tension carries forward into the whole of the story, following the building of a temple and the asking for a King, both things God does not desire and yet accomodates within an express commitment to a promise that reaches beyond the confines of history.
Which is of course what makes the theological signifance of the “numbers” in Numbers so fascinating. Just as we find in the creative rendering of genealogies in the NT, expressly rooted in the authors intentional connecting of the promise to Jesus through the messiness of the human story it must circumvent, we find the same creativity at play here in this early depiction of Israel connecting to the 12. The reason for the creativity needed to get to 12 is that the Levites aren’t counted: they are set apart. There are thirteen tribes that can be counted as 12 in various ways, and the reason for such counting is rooted in a people looking to locate God’s acting in their midst over and against the failure of the people. Which of course draws all the way towards a similar portrait regarding the 13th disciple in the Gospels. But here is what is important in this narrative: each tribe is seen as necessary to the idea of Israel as a whole. And as each Tribe is seen as necessary, so is the focal point of the promise as being for the whole of creation. This is what comes together at this central focal point of the tabernacle Here in this narrative we find a transition from a family to a people, thus bringing to the forefront the question “who belongs to God’s people.” This is answered: through kinship. This is what brings the mixed group that we now have into a singular whole, all centered around the Exodus. And yet this binding together, the creative rendering of the community of God as a portrait of a singular image of the Kingdom of God, is always carrying with it this existing tension between the exodus and the desert, the mountain and the golden calf. This is the same tension we wrestle with today as a people called to follow in the Way of Jesus towards the cross. Through the cross we find resurrection.
One last note to this end. Judah is obviously presented as the biggest tribe and the most relevant. In terms of the texts composition history, we are following the thread of the story of the winners (the only surviving tribe from the exile). Altmann notes the puzzle piece of the promise given to Judah (to make a people while they are still slaves) and the whole ensuing motif that comes out of the Exodus regarding Judah willingly suffering on behalf of his brother Benjamin (Gen 44), a reversal of this thematic interest in slave versus free which underscores the persisting image of the suffering servant. Here in the soil of this centralizing movement, God’s indwelling of creation within the tabernacle functions as a reminder of where this journey is going. The image of Judah and Benjamin. The image of Moses and Aaron. The image of the Levites whom are established as representative of and in place of the firstborn of the firstborn (Israel) when Israel is depicted as “fearing” speaking to God directly (as Moses fears speaking directly to the Pharoah of Egypt). This is where and how we move beyond history into the promise of new creation. This is how we learn what it is to name God not through the visible presence of idols, but through the revelation of a spoken Word that transcends the visible.
In the beginning God spoke to bring about creation
In the end God spoke to bring about the new creation in Jesus
In the middle God speaks in the wilderness to a people set apart to image the True revelation to a divided creation. To fear the gods we can see is to fear that which we have made in our own image. To fear the God we can hear is to fear that which dismantles our idols. The one who dismantles our census, who brings down kings, who destroys our temples, all so that out of the desert creation might be transformed from death to life.
That’s how long it has been since I graduated high school. And subsequently that’s how long it has been since I’ve seen most of my graduating class.
Had a random invitation the other week to meet up with some old classmates. Two to be precise. The reason? My old school was honoring a former classmate for his life long accomplishments. Thus the odd intracation on social media led to a saturday morning breakfast, filling in the gaps of the past 31 years. Mostly on my end since the two of them had remained in contact over the years.
It’s such an interesting experience. If the knowledge I have of tumbling towards 50 in 2026 is looming large these days, nothing cements it more than finding myself in what felt like a surreal time capsule. Here we are, three souls who’s memories remain trapped in time attempting to contextualize the very real passage of time.
But of course that brings a ton of emotions along with it. Beginning with the fact that fhere I am sitting across the table from successful architects here to celebrate the lifelong achievements of a doctor. One of whom was voted in our graduating year book “most likely to be Prime Minister. I was voted most likey to be a bum for the rest of his life.
Me. The same one who’s life story travels the failed attempts at music and ministry. The same one who has spent the last 13 years driving a school bus and making $30,000 a year (with christian and spring and summer breaks off of course).
I suppose that’s the closest I could come to living up to the prophecy of my graduating yearbook.
It’s interesting. I was telling those two former classmates about a particular pivotal year of my life following our graduation. The same year saw two of my closest friends make decisions that would go on to define the rest of their now extremely successful lives. One would go off to school to become an investor in multi-million dollar businesses. The other would go off to school to become a professional musician. I had both of them come to me and try and convince me to go with them. They saw potential in me and believed this journey could change the course of our lives.
One of them even tossed a book on the table (How To Win Friends and Influence People) with the request to read it before making my decision.
I ultimatley chose not to follow either of them. I know now that my life likely would look a lot different had I done so. And yet here I am, sitting at a table across from two familiar faces from my past being reminded that what makes a life is the very real path shaped by the very real succession of our choices. Choices that are not reducible to a singular conception of some kind of self determining will. Reality is far more dynamic.
My former classmates responded to some of these musings by pointing out that its all about where we place the emphasis regarding what is important. This certainly applies to our relationship with God. This also applies to what this lived life looks like in relationship to God. To grow to learn. To come to the table as those who have a perspective to offer. Whether we are successful architects, receiving prestigious awards, or whether we have spent the last 13 years driving a school bus. What fills in the gaps between our careers and our identity is how this plays in to who we have become in the process of living in the inbetween spaces.
This is where we find the ability to navigate the what and the why of our continued journey. We never stop making choices, and we never cease having the chance to understand how we arrived at such choices and why. Perhaps that’s what makes the whoie enterprise worth investing in.
I recently finished the book The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind by Jason M. Baxter. Highly recommended. It’s a rich and compelling exploration into the writers that shaped Lewis’ own journey and thought practices. It is in fact these voices that provide a window into what plagued his own sense of restlessness with the world, both as a once staunch athesit and a christian convert.
It is often assumed that we can jump to spirituality apart from religion or without it. Or we think that spirituality is the foundation of all religion. One of the compelling ideas that I took away from this book is the authors conviction that what we find in the medieval mind of C.S. Lewis is this deeply felt conviction that it is in fact religion that is the necessary foundation for a true spirituality.
And for Lewis, he found this shared conviction in the medieval minds that shaped the space he occupied standing on the precipice of these shifting tides between the old world and the new. Lewis was a product of modernity, a world in which he felt he never belonged. This is where he finds an awakening of the imagination in the works of those looking backwards to the world modernity had forgotten and left behind in the shadow of its failed promises. This framed and formed his relationship to the Inklings, anchored as it was in the chorus of voices preserving the act of mythmaking and mythtelling in the face of an entirprise that threatened to redefine such essential human practices as allegiance to stories that “are not true.”
There is a curious sense then, at least for me, in which modernity of course never did truly buy into its own positivist premise. Spirituality just kept breaking back in and imposing itself on to the sometimes unarticulated but often expresssed disatisfaction with the world modernity was creating.
One question this book begs is, but what about religion? What is spirituality apart from its formative myths? What is it that makes religion the demon and gives spirituality its accepted preservation in the age of modernism?
There could be many ways to answer this. Some practical. Some theoretical. Some philsophical. What this book underscores is that religion and myth-telling are one in the same thing. The problem then is not religion, but the demonization of myth-telling. Reclaiming myth-telling means both challenging modern definitions and challenging conceptions that any truly exist apart from a formative myth. We are all in this sense religious creature and religious beings, although not in the way modern apologetics often likes to state it. It is simply meant to say that no spirituality, or a perceived lack of such, exists apart from a necessary myth. Myth is simply the narrative that governs how we interpret the world. It makes it coherent and gives it defintion. It names the Truth that our intperpretations are responding to.
Earlier this year I read the book The Last Romantic: C.S. Lewis, English Literature, and Modern Theology by Jeffrey W Barbeau. Equally recommended, and it covers much the same topic by narrowing in on how Lewis was shaped by the Romanticists based on his same disatisfaction with the modern world. Here he locates an undeniable witness to a shared disatisfaction, with this historical movement and interest functioning in direct response to a world that needed to be reenchanted by recognizing our need for myth-telling. It is only here that we can distinguish between the competing narratives of our world.
So why is religion necessary to this conversation? Perhaps it is because modernity is left needing to attend for spirituality but without a way to catgetorize it or make sense of it. Perhaps because modernity cannot function apart from this essential part of what it is to be human. To be human is to be a religious creature. Perhaps it is a simple acknowledgement that attempts to reposition ourselves in a world defined by the absence of myth has actually made the world incoherent.
It is true that even for views that reject spirituality, they are still operating from a religious foundation. It does however carry a unique relevance for those who acknowledge the presence of spirituality in our world.
However we come into that conversation, this simple idea that religion always precedes spirituality has been forcing me to reconsider how it is I find my own resistance to religious structures. It is easy to misplace such resistance as a targetting of systems and organization and institutions. After all, when we find ourselves wrestling with certain realities and pushing back on things that leave us unsettled or reactive and responsive against, we need somewhere or something to function as our scapegoat. And if we accept that spirituality appears unavoidable on a cultural and social level, this affords us the appearance of a spirituality that is able to break the chains we are trying to dismantle all its own. What the historical vantage point of this book challenges is the idea that spirituality can ever logically stand on its own own. If we have recovered or rediscovered or discovered spirituality, it means we are operating from a religious foundation. This is a good and necessary thing, perhaps at odds with a world which has spent so much of its energy dismantling both our institututions and our belief in them, but nevertheless coherent when seen in the light of a studied historical reality.
Which is to say, if the end for Lewis was a liberated spirituality, that liberation needed to be able to both name the narrative/myth it embraces and the one it is challenging. It needs to be able to afford us a narrative lens through which to reason from if it wants to be able to critique a lens it sees as a distortion of the truth. This is not a bad thing. We’ve been taught to fear the notion of conviction, but convictions, or true beliefs, are necessary to living in this world in a way that is truthful. For Lewis this meant coming to terms with the fact that he felt isolated and alone in his disilusionment with modernity, and equally at home in encountering the voices bringing some of the necessary parts of that medieval mind back into the conversation. In a similar way, I find books like this allowing me to feel a little less alone in the world I occupy. I have long resonated with the concerns and intrests of The Inklings, and this book helps capture why that is the case.
In my half point reflection back at the beginning of July, I noted the overall lack of releases in 2025, along with these films reflecting a slate of good to very good but not great releases with there being very little in the way of real standouts.
Following up on the first front, at the end of the summer I did a comparison between this year and last, showing a considerable drop off in the numbers. On the latter front, i would say that narrative has been holding strong, with a plethora of think pieces and analysts and critics noting similar thoughts.
We are however now in the thick of September, which is otherwise known as festival season. This is where those anticipated fall releases, typically made up of Oscar hopefuls, get their premiers and start to get seen. This offers us filmgoers a chance to shift our attention towards some anticipation
It’s also worth noting that there is some optimism on the box office front, albeit with certain qualifiers: the box office is up nearly 20 percent from where we were coming out of the pandemic. I’m not sure everyone is over the moon about the top performers, which include Disney’s Lilo and Stitch, A Minecraft Movie, Jurassic World: Rebirth, and the live action How To Train Your Dragon (while there’s nothing wrong with the others and they certainly have a place in the filmgoing ethos, this is the one four star entry for me), but there is another good news story to add to the mix that helps to buffer the never ending headlines about the struggling superhero genre. That’s the fact that WB has presently broken a record for the number of films that opened at number one. One of the reasons this should be seen as a good news story is not just because its bringing bodies and money to the theaters, but because it has done so while fostering diversity. They’ve demonstrated they can do it with a small film like Weapons, franchise films like Final Destination and The Conjuring, and are even taking risks with films like Mickey 17.
So where’s festival season at? Much of the buzz heading into the year was around the question of Netflix’s obvious move to go for broke on the Oscar front, aquiring a number of big time Directors and auteurs. Kathryn Bigelow’s newest A House of Dynamite. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. Of the three, only Bigelow’s film has really been offering much in terms of potential, and even then has been premiering to tempered reaction, indicating its not likely to have much of a presence come awards season.
Outside of Netflix, three big hitters are aiming to shake up the conversation: Paul Thomas Anderson’s much anticipated One Battle After Another, which has been trending better than expected on the eve of its wide release, and Sentimental Value, the newest film by Joachim Trier and the follow up to the successful and popular Worst Person in the World. And lastly Chloe Zhao’s adaptation of Hamnet, the one standout darling from this years festival circuit.
Zhao is one of my all time favorite directors, and having recently finished the book it has definitely given me something to look forward to along with a new PTA. I would have thrown A Big Bold Beautiful Journey into the mix, given the pedigree of Kogonada, but while its still very good, it fell short of the massive expectations thrust on it by Columbus and After Yang (no doubt a film worthy of a whole discussion in its own right, as there is a ton there to reflect upon). There is also a ton of buzz surrounding Springstein: Deliver Me From Nowhere, along with Timothee Chalamet in Marty Supreme, the sure to be crowdpleaser from “The Rock,” The Smashing Machine. Jennifer Lawrence in the intriguing Die, My Love. New Richard Linklater (Nouvelle Vague), and a new one from the underseen Director of Little Woods called Hedda. And of course Bugonia.
And then of course there is that looming awareness of the next Avatar film, which say what you will is a cultural force (and also a franchise I unapologetically enjoy and love), along with part two of Wicked (Wicked For Good), two films sure to dominate discussions in the next couple months.
Which is to say, maybe too much is made of a “good to very good but not great” year. After all, there’s nothing inherently wrong with very good films, and in some ways this leaves room for more diverse reactions and reasoning as to what is resonating with different people and why. There is a handful of films that I’m eager to revisit as well, including Kogonada’s A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. I can see that one growing on a rewatch.The Legend of Ochi, which is probably the film I’ve been thinking about the most
There was a little bit of a shakeup from where my top 20 films were sitting at the halfway point. The films that got knocked out of my top 20:
Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning
The Order
Inside
Grand Theft Auto
The final MI film is a tough one, as there is no question it represents the biggest film of the year in terms of pure spectacle and accomplishment. I think that’s a case of feeling like it doesn’t need the attention that other films could desperately use. The Order, a solid, well crafted Canadian procedural, Inside, a small, provocative prison drama, and the inventive and suprisintly emotional Grand Theft Auto, would all fall into that category. Those are the ones I’m sad to see bumped out.
The films they were traded for:
Ari Aster’s Eddington at #12, which is without a doubt his most accessible film to date, and also his most ambitious in terms of theme and ideas. The only other film challenging it on those levels would be Zach Kregger’s Weapons, his follow up to Barbarian. Eddington manages to be a film that is as intriguing in its sructural presence as it is in what it wants to do and say with that structure. Its set in the pandemic, but its reaching far more broadly in order to say something about the greater issues running underneath society dysfunction. Its set in America, but it never stays trapped there, providing a fascinating grounds for discussion.
Spike Lee’s Highest to Lowest at #18, a fresh adaptation of a timeless novel and a true cinematic masterpiece (High and Low). It’s not as good as that aformentioned masterpiece, but the book is ready made for different interpretations on its central moral crisis, offering a template on which to explore moral complexity, issues of class, allegiances. A true “what if” scenario that lends Spike’s rendition a real legitimacy all its own. What I particularly loved about it was its religious symbolism, an intentional choice that affords the imagery in the film substantive layers. It’s exploring particular questions, but its also exploring big questions at the same time.
Vulcanizadora, Joel Potryska’s debut film, also tackles a moral crisis, and just might be the most intense single concept film I’ve seen in years. Where it goes is truly shocking. It’s the sort of film that doesn’t really settle until after its done and has time to fully sink in. Then the pieces start to come together in a very real way. I have this one at #19
The addition in the highest spot goes to the only superhero film in my top 20, The Fantastic Four: First Steps at #9. Mabye its the suprise of just how good and truly authentic the film is. I had no idea what to expect, but it managed to stake its claim on my emotions and my mind with its affecting blend of nostalgia and forward thinking commentary. What’s most impressive is that it never allows itself to get too big for its ideas, managing to keep the experience simple but profound. It’s about family, but its also about community, exploring how both of these things function within a given society. It’s also about motherhood, and about sacrifice, and about how these things can operate as symbols for greater truths that inform our existence as a shared humanity. If that sounds like a lot for a superhero film, it is. But it never feels like a lot, and that is to the great strength and credit of the film.
That means my top 8 remain the same:
The Ballad of Wallis Island
Sinners
28 Years Later
The Legend of Ochi
Black Bag
F1
The Penguin Lessons
Materialists
If I had to wager what I could see moving and shifting with some rewatches, I still feel unsttled by Sinners and Black Bag. I’m banking on them being in a decent spot, but I feel like both films were clouded by being experiences given to the moment. Especially with how much I keep thinking about The Legend of Ochi. F1 I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on. I know what kind of film it is, why I resonated with it and why its ranking that hi. The Penguin Lessons is one i feel similarly about. Materialists is the one that I could also see threatening to jump up a bit when I see it again. Its a film I found myself wrestling with, and that is a pretty good indication that there is more to mine.
And The Ballad of Wallis Island? There’s no need for me to question that one. When you know you know, and that’s a film that very quickly captured my senses right out of the gate. If it holds on and goes on to define my year, I couldn’t ask for a more positive vision.
I recently came across a recommendation for a new 2025 book by author Kate Riley called Ruth. It was advertised as a book for the curious and persistant seeker, following a “fictitious” religious commune/communty that has obvious and direct allusions to the Hutterites.
I’ll be honest, after going out and purchasing it and now having finished it, I find myself conflicted. I can sense, and even see in part, notes of brilliance behind the page. And yet, the further I got into the book, the more distance I was experiencing when it came to grasping that brilliance. Even further, I felt like the story had lost me despite my best efforts to stay centered in it, and no amount of retreading and re-reading pages and even chapters seemed to help in relocating me within what this book was trying to do.
However, the book did leave me thinking and wrestling. In particular, I loved the way the author uses the basic premise of this fictionalized Hutterite community, which we navigate from the point of view of a young woman named Rtuth, to flesh out certain nuances regarding the human experience, especially where it relates to our beliefs. Where the book feels like it is operating as a critique in one moment, it deftly “critiques the critique” with the same brush using certain questions or observations or plotting to try and upend and overturn our expectations for dogmatism on either side. For example, as it explores the restrictive social dynamics of this community, the challenge of an ideological vision for a community where no one lacks is juxtaposed against this idea of an enforced impoverished state. Or the idea that this is built on a partioning out of needs and wants, an act that often blurs where and how and why such lines get drawn. The same “want” can be seen to restrict ones sense of self while similtaneously being correct in the potential destruction it can bring about in the life of a community, family or individual. Or the same “need” can be seen to give itself to the illusions of wanted desire, leading one to question where certain restricitons are actually leading to forms of oppression and harm.
These sorts of nuances play through the intracicies of Ruth’s own delicate dance between the safety of the community and the constant allure of the world that lies beyond it. In a very real sense this is a book about seeking truth, and the more Ruth seeks the more complex and shadowed things become. It is one thing to note sexual desire, for example, it is another to attend for the ways such desires can enslave. In this, the world might offer us the allure of desire and discovery but it cannot attend for the destruction. It can only contain such realities within the reductionism of our constrcuted ideas of a liberated self. Which of course is never a truly liberated self. We are all slaves in the end.
The book also uses this same approach to explore the nature of belief in God. After all, when God is rooted in the bigger questions regarding the nature of reality and the foundations of our beliefs and convictions, the temptation is to reduce that to the sorts of practicalities of rules and regulations that are easier to control, which of course are part of any given society, Hutterite or secular. And as is common, where we find rules we want to break them and escape them. Thus seeking the world often means seeking a world without God precisely because we believe this promises true liberation from the shackles of religious oppression. As is often the position of the common secular humanist/atheist, in a world ruled by a particular conception of law and order, religion achieves such control of society by attaching the ideas of reward and punishment as negatives that belong to this agent called God. And yet in Ruths story, we find in the world that surrounds this community the same shackles and the same questions and the same control built on systems of reward/punishment. Thus this forms the essential struggle of the faith journey, forcing us to see beyond the trappings of moralism to find what actually grounds such constructs in something true. This constant push and pull between feeling God’s absence and God’s presence, between the practicalities of acceptment and judgment, of the allusive natures of Love and what we might call evils, of encountering our doubts and our convictions, is the thing that finds us always sitting in this pervasive tension regardless of where we find ourselves on this journey.
This is as far as I got with this story, and most of this I gleaned from the book’s first half. There is a transition that takes place around the halfway point in the story that progresses the plot, and it was here that I found myself trying to keep up, trying to figure out where to place and fit those above observations. And to be clear, there’s a good chance that the issue here was me. I’m okay with that being the case, and I would actually love to get someone elses thoughts regarding their navigation of the story. Maybe it will help clarify and bring some of that struggle into fresh light. As it is, I appreciated it more than I was able to truly experience it fully, even while I found its themes resonating nonetheless.
What was helpful for me however was finding some illumination on similar ideas in another book I’m presently reading. This was another recommendation, having come across an interview with the author that sold me on her voice and vew of the world. It’s a book called Confessions of an Amateur Saint: The Christian Leader’s Journey from Self-Sufficiency to Reliance on God written by Mandy Smith. To offer a very concise summary, its a book about how it is that Smith occupies space in Christian community while holding the sorts of tensions described in Ruth above. Part of what emerges from her own observations and experiences to this end is firstly, the simple concession that these tensions follow us regardless of where we find ourselves, and second that experiencing and carrying these tensions does not and should not disqualify us from occupying the spaces that we do. This is true even though the common perception is that it does and it should, a perception that is not discriminative to secular or religious grounds. It is not contradictory or hypocritical to exist within a community that abides by certain rules that we might or might not make sense of or disagree with or embrace on any given day with differing degress of nuance. In fact, this is precisely what it looks like to partcipate at all.
Here there are three insights Smith offers that I found especially resonant.
First, she invites us to root ourselves not in our own imagination but in God’s imagination. This distinctive becomes more than semantics, as it shifts our point of view towards an embrace of both a necessary foundation and its proper and fallible and always incomplete contextualization in our lives, societies and communities. There is something liberating about Ruth’s journey towards seeing the tension as much bigger than illusions of her individuality, and for Smith this becomes an important part of how it is we exist in the world, and how it is she exists in the Christian world.
Second, seek the grace to find a new river. There is context for this insight in Smith’s own journey that the book makes available, but to explain why it resonated with me leads me to my own love of rivers, oceans, seas and lakes. It is here in this essential image that we find the tension of existence embodied and symbolized. Chaos battling against beauty. Expanse battling against barriers. Life against Death. There is a reason why humans have long found a potent and transcendent imagination captured and held sacred in this space, in this image. For her, she uses this to imagine the necessary act of always seeking within the tension, and we should not be resistant to the notion that this requires binaries, even as participation works to flesh out what this means beyond (or within) these binaries. In a certain kind of irony, it is the existence of these certain binaries that seem evident in the foundation of the cosmos that liberates us to deconstruct the boundaries in the emergent properites that we find within.
Lastly, she invites us to test God’s resources. If this world is one in which we find God, if this world is one in which God exists, this world is then defined as a resource. The question is, a resource to what end. Further, to what degree of responsibility does this resource obligate us towards. If we are to move outside of ourselves we thus find ourselves moving towards something other. And our beliefs and convictions are simply acts of similtaneously naming this other while locating our acts of participation as the necessary means of knowing this other. In a world that is defined as one in which God exists, such a world is the resource of God, and thus to participate in this Reality is to know God.
There is a definite practicality to the way Smith unpacks these big ideas. It just struck me as profound in the moment, and perhaps it was reading Ruth that effectively helped prime these observations to take on an even greater weight. That’s the power of story after all.
One of the impulses of all art is to give a name to the cosmos we see despite all the chaos (A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L’Engle, Sarah Arthur)
I came across a descriptive the other day of what it looks like to navigate the 40’s (not the decade, but the age), This individual suggested that one of the most bizarre tendencies of this stated “phase” of life is the way the years start to officially blend together. Ultimately marked by the inevitable feeling that one is officially creeping past that point of no return, where there are, taking in the average lifespan, less potential years ahead than years left behind.
Thus one of the continued and persistent mantras of our engagement with the 40’s becomes simply this- I don’t know where I am precisely (it could be 43, or it might be 48), I just know that I’m not yet 50.
And oh how we cling to that mantra as though our life depends on it.
And lest someone think I’m being overly dire or negative, perusing the comments in response to this individual revealed a kind of irreverent sense of humorous affinity to this basic observation. In a “it’s funny because it’s true” kind of way. Which of course most of life seems to be.
10 years ago I started this blog as a place to flesh out my anxiety over approaching 40. I have vivid memories still of my struggle over this milestone. It was bad. If I could categorize it in this way; it felt like I was entering into unfamliar territory. In other words, it felt like I was utterly and completely lost and that the whole world was caving in on me all at once. I did not know what it looked like or felt llike to actually occupy that inevitable transition into a decade which would gradually bring me in to the second half of life. Now being in my 49th year, it’s a different kind of struggle. My feet are firmly planted in the soil of the second half of life. For the first time in my life I found myself sitting down at the bank and renewing our mortgage with an end in sight. I’ve made a job transition that, save for unforeseen cirucmstances or things going badly, qualifies as my path to retirement. Likely the last true transition I will face of its kind.
Turning 50, in definition, is not so much treading through unfamiliar soil as it is reinforcing the gradual march through the all too familiar terrain of the past 50 years with an emphasize on bookmarking. I am here. There is no going back. There is no holding on.
Seems timely and fitting then that this past year has been reinforcing the investment I’ve been making in my 40’s towards working through my life story. Trying to capture a sense of its narrative. Figuring out where all those memories have brought me. Where they have left me.
Where all the stories of my life, to borrow from the name I gave this blogspace, which I have long insisted point to the stories that have inspired and formed me through either art or encounters, come together with some sense of coherency.
These thoughts have been on my mind this month as I have been struggling to bear the weight of these latest certain transitions. They’ve been perculating this morning as I started a new book navigating the spiritual legacy of Madelein L’Engle called A Light So Lovely. A pivotal part of the stories of my own life given the way she inspired the wonder of my childhood imagination all those years ago. In the opening pages it becomes clear that this is not so much an attempt to lobby an outside perspective of who this person was, but rather to mine the memories for a sense of what framed her own sense of inspiration.
Which of course brings one to her art. And not just her art, but her convictions regarding the power of art to make sense of this world we all occupy together. I love how the above quote puts it: naming the cosmos despite the chaos. That resonates with one of the growing convictions that has gradually settled for me over this past decade, which is simply this- if we cannot name Death as that which opposes Life, we cannot name Life.
This growing conviction is compelled by my obvservation and experience of this world, and I have become more and more convinced that this basic truth is found in all places in all times in all the worlds stories, to borrow a phrasing from perhaps the most vocal adherent of this basic idea, J.R.R. Tolkien. There is a reason why the Lord of the Rings remains one of the most universasl and timeless and iconic stories ever written. It names Death, and thus frees us and liberates us to name Life, even if we don’t recognize it.
There is another truism that goes along with this: as I have become more and more vocal about this basic conviction, it has arguably led to some of the greatest resistance and pushback that I have ever faced in my 49 years of living. Something about naming Death as being antithetical to Life raises the defences. Which I find fascinating, as all indications seem to be that such a truism is intutiive to any act of living. So why do we fight against it? Why do we insist on romanticizing Death? Even spiritualizing it? Why do we insist on normalizing cycles of decay even as we spend our lives fighting its symptoms (sickness, suffering, opppression, violence, disorder)?
Perhaps, as L’Engle suggests, it’s because the chaos is what we know. Thus to name Death in opposition is to somehow take Life down with it. Perhaps it is because naming Death forces us to have to reconcile some sense of placing responsiblity for the “state” of things somehwere, and that makes us uncomfortable. Far better to ignore the problem of evil than have to attend for it on logical grounds.
Whatever it is, for me, I have settled in to this space where, despite the many questions that remain, I know this one thing to be true: if I cannot name Death in opposition to Life, I cannot name Life. And if I cannot name Life, I cannot name the symptoms of Death, be it suffering, oppression, violence decay, disorder. Without this basic truism the cosmos, for me, ceases to make logical sense.
In assessing L’Engle’s own spiritual legacy, author Sarah Arthur notes some of the inspirations that guided her own ability to occupy space between the chaos and the cosmos. One such note expresses an innate desire to “dig where it disturbs you, and see what God is doing.” After all, if we believe God is at work in all places, this should be our expectation regardless of our doubts and struggles.
And one of the most important tools we have available in doing this digging- we need someone “who can take our idols and smash them.” And what are idols but that which names this cosmos according to the lie that Death weaves. Idolatry is one of the biggest themes we find in the scriptures, and one of the most striking things about this image is precisely the way that idols image something that stands contrary to the Truth. In this way Death is not reducible to the modern conception of non-existance. Death in the ancient sense is an agency. A kind of Reality that stands in oppostion to the reality of God. It embodies disorder. It is the grounds of all suffering and oppression. It enslaves by binding us to a narrative that turns the chaos into a means of making ourselves into gods.
Only, when this happens we lose sight of our true image. Our true name. And as L’Engle’s own convictions led her to conclude, if your name isn’t known then it is a very lonely feeling (A Wind in the Door). Indeed, it becomes a very lonely world.
This sits at the heart of the spiritual quest, awakening us to the Truth that we have indeed been named according to Life, not Death. Naming is how we are known and seen in the world, not only by people but by the God who knows us. To be able to name Life is to be able to name God. And indeed, to name God is to find Life itself naming our own story as participants in the cosmos.
As I begin the slow march towards no longer being able to say “not yet 50,” I find comfort in this simple truth. I can name the cosmos despite all the chaos. And somewhere in that mix lies my own story acting in its own way in opposition to the chaos. Rather than my 40’s being the beginning of the end of a life lived in the necessary shadows of Death, it is a chance to make sense of why the cosmos awakens me to a different kind of Reality. To why that inherent need to name the cosmos sets our narratives in oppostion to the chaos. And in this, find my narrative in that mix.
There seems to be a common theme emerging for me this summer through conversations with people and with the things I am reading. Certainly some of it connects to the present state of politcs between Canada and America. The concerted movement to “reinvest” in Canada feels reminiscent of the Covid years where the shutdown was initially demonstrated as a bit of a strange novelty and perhaps even emraced with a tint of romance and aspiration (which is, of course, not noted at the expense of the real world tragedy of the virus). The present political landscape is drawing out different forms of social pressures and demands based on particular concerns and targeted responses. Part of the result, which is fascinating to parse through, has been a noted reclamation of the flag which, as one article I read put it, had been seen to be coopted during the pandemic by a certain faction of the political right. For some, which is a demonstrable statistic given the real world impact this response has had on both sides of the border, this present political state has been a wake up call and an attempt to recover that notoriously difficult question of what it means to be a Canadian.
Part of this discussion has of course spilled out into the question of people’s travels as well. The “buy Canadian” movement has trnaslated to an intentional commitment to avoid travel to the U.S.. This has inadvertently led to an increased sense of publicizing people’s travels to places not the U.S., be it in Canada or otherwise.
That’s where the book by Benjamin Valentin titled Touched By This Place: Theology, Community, and the Power of Place comes into the picture for me. It caps off a rich summer of reading filled with books wrestling with our relationship to home, be it Patti Henry’s The Story She Left Behind, a book that explores this mysterious connection between our main character’s life in America and an unknown history contained along England’s rural landscape. Or David Sodergren’s Summer of Monsters and Mary Lawson’s Crow Lake, two stories about struggling persona’s trying to reconcile the present state of their lives with the history that made them, both finding it rooted in their connection to the places they called home growing up. The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce, a book about the ways the interconnected characters of this estranged family have been shaped by the space that holds their histories (and their history) in its memory. Best of All Worlds by Kenneth Oppel, set in a dystopian future where the space is familiar but the place is not.
Destiny’s Past about an unknown connection to a place yet unknown that inspires a young woman to go on a journey to find herself across time. George Macdonalds Phantastes, about a felt home one knows but cannot see and seeks to find. Mark Allington’s Boogie Up the River about a journey to seek the meaning of the space (the Thames River) that has informed his life. Similar to Farley Mowat’s The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float and his journey up the coast of Newfoundland. Or Jerome K’s classic Three Men in a Boat, following their own journey up the Thames.
Or perhaps the non-fiction, be it The Golden Road, a book about a place (India) that transformed the world. Come Forth, a book about the power of a place to transform a life (Lazarus’ tomb). Ben Judah’s This is Europe, exploring how people are shaped by their sense of place. The First Ghosts, exploring the phenomena of spirits from an objective point of view in relationship to the places that appear to give these encounteres definition.
At one point Valentin cites Edward Said in his own attempts to explore this concept of place.
Is the beginning of a given work its real beginning, or is there some other secret point that more authentically starts the work off? (Edward Said)
This citation is meant to capture how who and what we are, and in this case what we do and create, is anchored to the spaces that shape us. He goes on to tie this to T.S. Elliot’s Little Gidding.
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
This then becomes a window into how it is we discover this place. To know a place truly is to know the ways it has shaped us. Thus we cannot know either apart from this necessary relationship. We need the journey of exploration that life represents to truly know both.
I’ve been thinking about this idea a lot over this past week. For me this isn’t so much about the question of what is Canada, although this is part of who I am. It’s about the question of where the different facets of who I am come from.
For example, I was having a conversation with a relative the other day who was commenting on the public onslaught of people on vacation and declaring their vacation plans and obsessing over travel. As someone who, to quote “has never been anywhere” beyond the two places they call home- where they presently live and where they grew up, they called the need to travel an “addiction,” and suggested that they “have no need or desire to go anywhere.” After all, when they can walk out of their front door and be at the riverfront, and when they can walk out of their cabin door and be at the lakefront, what’s the point of doing the same thing somewhere else.
This got me thinking about our different upbringings. They grew up in a place where people did not go anywhere (the GTA). In fact, my whole family except for us (my immediate family) did. I was born in Winnipeg. If the thought of travelling more than 3 hours was foreign to my Toronto kinfolk, in Winnipeg it was nothing to pick up and make a quick weekend out of a trip to Minneapolis 6 and a half hours away. This was commonplace when the next nearest Canadian center of significance was 14 hours away (sorry Regina). It’s just what we did. To be formed by Winnipeg was to be a traveller, even when it came to annual trips to the GTA over summer or Christmas growing up.
This relative moved to Winnipeg later in life, but retained the formation of his own sense of place back home. Which gives me a decent case study into how it is that we are products of where we are. As Valentin puts it, we are shaped by the places we inhabit through their “multidimensionality.” Places are nade up of both “physical realities and drenched in cultural meaning.” (p107) Thus, “Places gather human and non-human materialities….( becoming) potent epistemic catalysts (and) influencing all our ways of knowing.” (p108) Or epistemic agency of place, as it is described later.
Even further, he notes that the places in which we dwell and through which we move contribute something to the knowledge and truth claims we make. Knowledge doesn’t just emerge from the mind or “biological brain.” Knowledge is never just information. Knowledge is “in the world” as an act of contextualization, anazlyzed through the different facets of reality, be it historical, sociological, cultural and material.
Places are embedded in memory and as a practice of memory. Meaning, to return to a place is to be reminded both of what it is and therefore who we are in relationship to it. It is to know it as truth.
And this doesn’t just connect to where we live. It connects to places we visit, places we occupy for brief moments. Our memories are attached to the whole collection of spaces/places that make up the scope of our lives.
To drive by our first home is to occupy that space where my wife and I navigated the early years of our marriage. There I can see the intersection of so many different aspects of our lives, be it our decision to move into a cheap north end home while everyone else we knew was navigating to the more upper class neighborhoods East of the river. I can see the two dogs and lifelong companions that rescued us during some rough moments. I can see the busy nature of our lives in this time, fleshing out the shapes of our careers amidst working 6 different jobs between the two of us. I can see establishing routines, first “do it yourself” renos. I can picture the connections between the different faces and places in our lives and those commutes. I can imagine the decisions and choices, the trips, the smells of our routine meals.
Or there is the routine trips across the border to Grand Forks or Fargo, or weekends in Minneapolis, all places that hold our memories in their grip. To return to these places is to have those parts of ourselves come alive through those parts of that place that formed us, that awaken that sense of familiarity. Same with New York City, which became a significant part of our marriage story over the years.
There are also the endless places that we likely will never return to. Certain neighborhood spots that are no longer there. Faded memories of downtown Winnipeg from the eighties where we would head for everything from shopping to movies to restaurants. Spots that hold the memories of life shaping encounters and the formation of big, life altering ideas.
And of course the countless roads we have travelled to unfamiliar places in that effort to keep the push and pull of routine and investment in check by shaking up our senses, if for a moment.
A final short story to this end. In his younger years our son Sash hated travelling. He resisted it with a fervent passion. Having been adopted from Ukraine at 12 years old, the only world he knew before coming to Canada with us was the orphanage, And so we made a concerted effort to try and fill his years here with the sort of memory shaping endeavors that had been important to us, or at least to me, growing up, building into our routines a willingness to pick up and explore at a moments notice.
For the longest time we assumed this had been a complete failure, because from our point of view none of it had worked. Every memory seemed to be met with a miserable reaction. To be fair, part of that was keeping ourselves in check, as perhaps moving from one country to another was more than enough to occupy his sense of self in that moment in time.
And then he suprised us. Having been at his job for long enouigh to have a decent amount of vacation time, he had decided to book some time off. He is now almost 24. Out of nowhere he decided he was going to plan a trip to Banff. For him, he wanted to return to a place that was in his memory. A last minute sidetrip we had attached to a roadtrip to Edmonton and Calgary years back. For him this space reflected something signficant for him in terms of his story. And so he went. And he loved the experience of returning to a place he had been before. Like the T.S. Eliott quote above, discovering what that was all about by coming full ciricle.
Which is to say, whether we recognize it or not, we are touched by the places that inform our lives. The joy of living is the exploration of what these places are, as that’s where we find ourselves. And not only find ourelves, but find ourselves in connection to the world.
I was listening to an episode of the podcast It Means What it Means, titled “Scripting the Son with Kyle Hughes,” episode 86. Here Hughes discusses what is called “prosopological exegesis,” which reflects an interpretive approach which seeks to bring together appropriate criticisms and the role of Tradition. Put simply, “prosopon” means faces or persons, and exegesis means “interpretation of a text.” Thus it is a method that emphasises the persons evident within a text as the means to accessing what that text is saying. By persons this means taking all of the intersecting voices together when making sense of any given passage. This includes the audience, the compositers, the references to characters contained within, the writers, preexisting traditions that the compositers are working with, ect..
This might sound intuitive, but its often far less intuitive than we might think, largely due to the ways we bring in different competing allegiances and motivations to our readings of the scriptures. If this approach, which its worth mentioning is the subject of Hughe’s new book Scripting the Son: Scriptural Exegesis and the Making of Early Christology, can be summed up in one phrase, it could be “employing a necessary humility.” And it is this humility, Hughes argues, that we find in the practice of early interpretation, both within the Jewish framework that precedes Jesus (and that allows us to locate and make sense of Jesus) and in the early Church that follows Jesus.
It’s an observation that undestands and recognizes that what we find in the NT’s use of the OT is in fact a holistic and consistent practice that emerges from the OT itself (a recent episode of the Onscript podcast also delves into this with an interview with Gary Schittjer regarding how to study the Bible’s use of the Bible (the author of How to Sudy the Bible’s use of the Bible: Seven Hermeneutical Choices for the Old and New Testaments).
What brought this observation to light even further for me this morning was digging into a commentary on the book of Numbers by Peter Altmann and Caio Peres. Here Altmann and Peres argue in the opening pages that Numbers, more accurately or naturally translated from the Hebrews as “In the Desert,” is a vital portion of the OT narrative precisely because of the ways in which it parallels and connects the journey’s of distinct generations. On a macro level, we can connect the story of Israel “in the desert” on their way to the Promised Land with the story of the Church “in the desert” on its way to the fullness of time, or the new creation reality.
A journey that reflects our occupying that inbetween space.
And yet, this doesn’t mean being stagnant or stuck. The authors note how Numbers reflects a people who are on the move both geographically and spiritually. They are invested in this space and they see it as integral to the larger narrative of expectation. The fact that it depicts this as a “transition between generations” is what it makes it particularly powerful. Much in the same way that reading Deuteronomy from the perspective of a people in exile (understanding Deuteronomy as a temple text) looking back on a generation standing on one side of the Jordan reflecting on the previous generation that had come to the other side of the Jordan. Three generation in conversation, all bound by the same narrative.
Here Altmann and Peres note, “Because God’s people are always in the process of being formed afresh, Numbers contains many texts that update commands given by God in the previous biblical textst.” This might sound like heresy to some. but that would be unforunate. As the authors suggest, “(this) sets a model of how to interpret, adapt and apply God’s word to a braoder variety of communities throughout time and variable geographies.”
Sounds a lot like prosopological exegesis.
Hughes said something too that has really been sticking with me. He takes some misapplications of the word “fulfillment” to task, cautioning against writing a narrative that sees a beginning and an end. The minute we write the story as one in which they went through the desert so that we don’t, we’ve lost that central componant that binds one generation to another- the invitation to enter into and participate in the patterns of history. Part of the pattern, as the commentary on Numbers points out, is this constant act of centralization leading to decentralization. This is why we see embedded even in the liteary patterns of Leviticus, a literary design within the encampments that signifies this portrait of this ever expanding and distributing nature of the priesthood. Always reaching outwards with the tabernacle/temple (the presence of God) at its center.
And yet, as Numbers also expressly outlines, this patterned history is one in which we find both Life and Death at play. Thus what accompanies this distribution is a needed transformation. The continued act of recentralization if you will. This is what the promise hinges on. This transformation is found in the expectation of the fullness of time, not as an end but as a new beginning. it is one thing for transformation to occur from Death to Life, it is another for this transformation to continue and persist in a reality where Death has been defeated. Both of these things are held together within the narrative. This is where the generations intersect.
I’ve been pondering, or perhaps praying over what this means for my own desert space. The commentary offers a helpful inroad to this end. Noting the confusing and often frustrating lack of a clear beginning and end in Numbers, they suggest that often readers are “less clear on how to read it because we do not know what to expect.” They go on to suggest thinking about Numbers as one might a “human life.” We build the narrative of our lives by “omitting many parts.” Arguably we need to do this in order for our lives to make coherent sense. A book like Numbers however disorients us precisely because it tries to life to the cover of that narrative up momentarily in order to explore some of the less than linear parts. It’s a reminder that life is less orderly, less structured, less coherent in the space we occupy in the moment. And yet that’s precisely where things are moving and being shaped and being transformed. This is the shape of our experience. Yes, there is need for that narrative appraoch. This is just as important for our understanding of a life. For our understanding of the Christian story. And yet sometimes that need can get in the way of the living. It can lead to us stopping moving. To a failure to participate. To take off the narrative cover means encountering something that feels chaotic and incoherent and confusing and hard, perhaps even to the point of feeling like perhaps we had the wrong narrative. Maybe God isn’t in this.
That is however, to borrow from a formative voice in my life, Micheal Gorman, why participation matters. This is why participation matters to the narrative. We can describe the narrative of our lives in certain terms. Without that participation, which describes faith in the truer sense of the word as “lived conviction,” we can never truly know that narrative. This is the necessary act of trust that the promise requires. This is the invitation placed before the generations of Israel. It is the invatiion placed before the life of the priesthood that makes up the Church. This is where we find the pattern. In the faces and persons occupying our lives.
The Stories of my Life 