Blogging at Scriptorium Daily

In addition to working as the editor of The Examined Life, I’ve recently begun writing for the faculty blog of the Torrey Honors Institute, Scriptorium Daily.

You can find my author page and all my posts here.

Ascension Day Sermon

Preached on June 2, 2011 at Redeemer Church in La Mirada, CA.

There are no floating angels in the Bible.  The whole hovering angel with billowing skirts thing: it isn’t there.  There are hardly any flying angels.  They stand and sit and walk.  They are often fairly easily mistaken for your good old everyday human being.  They can sometimes be wrestled or given food.  When they fly (if they fly) they fly with big, weird wings, often in clusters of six or covered with eyes.  Or they are (you know) giant, spinning wheels hurling lightning.  Monstrous beasts.

But mostly they just look like guys.  Shiny guys, sometimes, yes, but guys.  On the ground.  Solidly on the ground.

We only imagine them floating around or sedately flapping two dovish pinions because of a funny mental holdover from early Christian paintings.  See, those early paintings were more concerned with collections of symbols than with realism.  They put halos on people’s heads to indicate that, as Christians, they carried the presence of God with them.  They swathed Jesus in red and blue, colors symbolizing divinity and humanity, to show that he was both God and man.  They did all this not because it is ‘realistic,’ but because it meant something.  They were using symbols.  Similarly, when they wanted to say “This guy’s an angel,” they added wings, and often stuck him higher up in the painting.  This wasn’t because angels typically flap a pair of wings in the air above us.  It was because the painters needed some way to visually distinguish angels from humans in their system of symbols.  They needed an immediately comprehensible symbol for angels, like the abstracted shapes of men and women on bathroom doors.  They picked wings and airborne-ness.

Our imaginations got more confused, however, when paintings became progressively more ‘realistic,’ but then kept the old symbols in place.  Suddenly the painted angels looked ‘realistic,’ but they remained floating.  Now we can hardly imagine the Nativity story without a bunch of flappy, floaty guys in the sky.  Whoops.

Yet in fact, there’s almost no flying in the Bible at all unless you’re a bird, have a bird’s body parts, or are one of those thunder wheels.  There’s no floating.  No one just floats up in the air.  Get that out of your head.  Stick to the ground.

Elijah does get swept up to God, but in a whirlwind.  The angel that announces Samson’s birth to his parents goes up to God, but in the fire of their burnt offering.  Jacob sees angels ascending and descending to God, but they’re on a ladder.  All those almost-floaters go up by means of something physical: wind, fire, ladder.

There is no Superman in the Bible, flying with his fist out front.  There’s no Neo.  And (thank God) there’s no billowing cloth-draped nudists like in the paintings.

There’s nothing else, in fact, quite like the Ascension.  The Ascension breaks the rules.

I want you to try and remember that we’re grounded people.  That stuff sticks to the ground.  That planes and hang-gliders are weird.  That skyscrapers are new.  That you walk by shoving the world with your feet.  That lovely scents are grown and ground and combined before they’re bought.  That food comes out of the dirt or by spilling some blood.  That photos are flat.  That your skin makes oil.  That her perfume makes you shiver.  That your butt’s designed to flatten to spread your weight along that pew.  That babies are made by… bodies.  That laughter feels a certain way as well as sounding a certain way.  I want you to try and remember bodies.

This groundy, jolly, bodied world is the world of the Bible.  The Bible wasn’t written for our sweet, rococo illustrations of it.  It’s talking about this, and even the angels are grounded.  No floating.

Let’s stop.  Remember your senses.  Smell.  Listen.  Look.  Touch.  Taste.   …Remember that time when you saw the morning light turn a hummingbird’s wings to yellow and its throat a flashy red?  Remember the feel of your fingers running along a walkside chain link fence?  Remember the smell of redwoods, sweat, and dirt while playing frisbee in the mountains?  Remember the taste of creme brulee?

This down-here, sensual world was the one that Christ walked in…thud, thud, thud… smelling, tasting, touching things.

And then he penetrated the air.  He broke the earthy barrier and went up into that place that we said was reserved for birds and weird visionary wheels.  The place that even the angels didn’t go except by flapping.  He rose up from the floor.  His body.  Up, up, up until a cloud covered him.  Have you watched a loosed red balloon go up until a cloud covers it?  It doesn’t happen quickly.  Up, up, up.

His body, Christ’s hiccuping, laughing, dancing, hugging, farting, tensing, bleeding, singing, speaking, “touch my hands and my side” body rose up into the air.

Early paintings of the Ascension can’t quite figure out what to make of this.  They exude a lovely human awkwardness.  They put Jesus on a mountain instead of in the air, they surround him with an almond of angel heads.  They show nothing but his feet, sticking out of the top of the frame.  And the painters are right.  This Ascension thing is physical, heavy, funny: weird.

So why’d he do it?  Well, there’s lots to be said about that.  Dom said a good bit about it at last year’s service.  He did it to establish his reign over all the earth.  He did it so that his disciples wouldn’t go looking for him anywhere, and so that they wouldn’t be fooled by anyone on earth who claimed to be him.  He did it because the Holy Spirit would not have been poured out on the Church if he had stayed behind.

He did it because it was time for him to return to his Father, time to minister to his creation through his Church.  He was returning to his Father to wait, intercede, and prepare.

And this is what we’re zooming in on: it would not have been enough for Jesus to go to his Father “spiritually” (whatever that means).  No, he went to drastic measures to show us that his communion with God is the same as humanity’s communion with Him: body and soul, together.  He, a human, a slap-thigh human, was ascending to be in perfect union with God the Father.  In this most unnatural of his physical actions, most defiant of physical laws, God was making a startling affirmation of the physical dimension of human existence and of the physical world as a whole.  He was saying, “It is very good.”

God wants to be in communion with you.  With all of you.  Body and soul.  He’s not an invisible floaty thing who only cares about your invisible floaty bits.  Your God is a God who has become enfleshed.  He became like you, and in doing so he set a new pattern for you to follow, one that you can follow.  We humans are meant to live like Jesus lived.  That’s why, when Christ returns, “we… will be caught up together… in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.”  We, body and soul, will follow the pattern that Christ set, and by ascending like he did, be ushered into the fullest, richest, embodied communion with God that anyone in our race has ever or will ever experience.  We, friends, “will meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.”  When we walk the New Jerusalem streets, breathing the new earth’s air, we will have been ushered into deep, bodily communion with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

Alright, so that’s a little bit of why Jesus did what he did when he ascended.  Now let’s talk about why he did it the way he did it.  Here’s the question: “Why did he go up?  Why not go to be with the Father any other way?”

Let’s say the obvious thing:  He did not go up because the Father is actually at the end of that spatial trajectory.  He didn’t do it for efficiency of transportation.  He didn’t say, “Well, God the Father’s located at 1295 Alpha Centari Way.  It’ll take me 30,000 years to get there once I’ve made the jump to light speed and 30,000 years to get back with the New Jerusalem Mothership.”

No, God the Father isn’t sitting around outside the atmosphere somewhere, and Jesus probably didn’t keep on going past the moon.  He didn’t ascend to help himself or to help the Father.  He ascended to help us.  He gave us something by going up.

Here’s what I mean: Ever since the beginning of time, God has been revealing himself to us through his creation.  He’s been filling it with his glory.  That means that he’s made it beautiful and that we’re supposed to recognize his craftsmanship when we see its beauty, yes, but it means something richer, too.

Just like when friends begin to infuse things with new, special meanings–”that’s the park where we…” “Oh look!  A multi-colored paper journal!  Chad must have been here!”–God has been grabbing hold of the stuff of this world–oil and blood, snakes and lambs, jasper and bronze, water and bread and wine–and filling it with potent, meaningful connections to himself.  He doesn’t just communicate to us with words.  He’s poked his finger into everything around us and said, “When you look here, you can find me.”  He’s blanketed us with meaning.  The world is full of his glory.

The Ascension is one of the times when God was revealing himself through the world.  You see, space itself–direction–was meant to be filled with holy meaning.  God had always been encouraging his people to look up when they thought of him or worshipped him–just scan the Psalms for directional words–but Christ has solidified this physical tool for communion and communication with him.  “Up” can mean “Godwards” now, and that’s useful, beautiful, and good.  Now it’s impossible for us to be anywhere in space without being in direct contact with a reminder of God’s presence.  Now we can raise our hands in worship, and have it be a physical reference to Christ, and a physical supplication for his return.  We can always look toward the place from which Christ will come, and that’s pretty incredible.

But it’s just like God.  He’s always trying to reveal Himself to us in ways that are abundant, close to us, and lovely.  The world is charged with the grandeur of God, a grandeur that’s longing to flame out toward us… if only we could have the eyes to see it.

Embodied, earth-bound friends, let’s learn to search through the world with our senses and minds, waiting expectantly for the revelation of God to come pouring out at us.  Let’s learn to look up and think, “Christ.”  Let’s learn to eat bread and think, “Christ.”  Let’s learn to drink wine and think, “Christ.”  Let’s gather the brightly colored markings God has made in the earth, hold them close, and show them to each other.

This year, let the Ascension teach you two things: that your body is the Lord’s and that the earth is the Lord’s.  Learn that God is saving your body as well as your soul, and learn that he’s speaking to you always through a richly God-infused world.  Christ, our God, has gone up.

Los Angeles, by Michael Maltzan

Design Observer has published another special essay on Los Angeles, this one characterizing it as attractive and “real” because of its turbulency and because of its ability to unmask potent binaries, holding them, as it does, side-by-side.  One of the best parts of this article is its comments section, where disillusioned and ardent Angelinos are having it out about the city’s virtues and vices.  Here’s an excerpt:

I returned to Los Angeles two years later as a permanent resident and fell back into the sprawling environment, wondering if my newly minted education in architecture would help or blunt my capacity to understand subtleties in the urban setting. Perhaps I had previously romanticized the relentless terrain of Los Angeles. But by the time of my return, my perception of the scale of the city had changed. It was now an unending conveyor belt of diversity and iteration. As I look back, I recall memories from that time of successive, lovely, serpentine journeys through and across the city. As a montage of images and impressions, the memories have no beginning or end — just the pleasure I found while riding within an unspooling stream of experiences.

Read more.

Frock Fights, Screamo Squabbles, and Culinary Clashes: Aesthetic Discord in the Home

I wrote an article to Christian parents for the ePublication I edit, The Examined Life.  It tackles the rampant (and growing, I think) problem of family discord that finds its locus in aesthetic considerations.  I argue that a vast understanding of beauty and an insistence on learning to appreciate ever more aesthetic forms is a key to familial unity during an age of marketing-driven aesthetic plurality.

Here’s an excerpt:

It’s now pretty common knowledge that the most marketable group of people in America are males roughly between ages 16 and 30.  They’re closely followed by females of the same ages (for reasons inscrutable).  We’ll ignore the gender distinction and just say “Wheatstone-aged folks.”  Let’s be clear: “the most marketable group” means “the group off of which businesses can make the biggest profit.”  “Biggest profit” means something like “Mecca” to said businesses.  To sum up, Wheatstone-aged folks are the darlings of corporate America.

A couple of things have followed from that discovery.  First, all the flashiest stuff is made with Wheatstone-aged folks in mind.  It is not made with you, their parents, in mind.  Second, all that stuff is made specifically in contrast with what was made for you parents.  That’s because Wheatstone-aged folks are more likely to spend money if they’re doing it outside the domain of their parents’ sway.  It’s good for the businesses, therefore to erect as many walls between the things Wheatstone-aged folks want to buy and the things that you want to buy as possible.

It’s no wonder, then, that we’re at each other’s throats over clothing, food, music, movies, games, and who-knows-what-all else.

Read more here.

Los Angeles, by Michael Light & David L. Ulin

From Design Observer:

“…This utilitarian connection to the city is one, I think, that gets to the essence of L.A. It exists at the heart of the dichotomy between private and public architecture, the pre-eminence of infrastructure, the balance between neighborhood and sprawl. Where else would we find freeway overpasses named for fallen heroes, such as the Clarence Wayne Dean Memorial Interchange, where the Antelope Valley Freeway sweeps into Interstate 5, named for the motorcycle policeman who died in that spot when his bike plunged off a piece of collapsed roadway during the Northridge earthquake? On the one hand, such a memorial seems ridiculous, reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’s caustic lines: “Here were decent godless people: / Their only monument the asphalt road. / And a thousand lost golf balls.” As with most things in Los Angeles, however, the surface masks another kind of depth. A site such as the Clarence Wayne Dean Interchange tells us something — not about our superficiality, but about the nature of how we live here, how we interact with our environment, which makes freeways among the most important monuments we have. It also highlights our complex relationship with the natural landscape, which can rise up at any moment to shake our most substantial structures loose. This is perhaps the least understood aspect of Los Angeles, the way it exists in the shadow of elemental forces, forces we cannot control. We build on terrain that is, in the most fundamental sense, unstable, that shakes and burns and floods with the regularity of the tides. Here again, we see the intercession of technology, and the limits of that technology at once. What does it mean that it all can fall to pieces in an instant, that what we have constructed here, no matter how apparently substantial, is as ephemeral and fleeting as a dream?

Still, it is a dream of substance, a dream that we can see and feel. It is a built dream, as concrete as it is abstract, an imposition of collective will. It is a three-dimensional set of hieroglyphs, a runic architecture unveiled in cloverleafs and rail yards, skyscrapers and industrial plants, dotted with small houses etched into the flats and hillsides, a narrative interposed upon the land. And if, in looking at it or living within it, we occasionally forget its essential nature … well, then, that’s part of the story also, a story in which illusion and reality are always both at hand.”

Read more.

After The Thin Red Line

The credits started rolling and my roommate and I switched the lamplight on mechanically, under duress.  We sat there nervously, both wanting the other to help us come to an understanding of the film, but feeling like anything that could be said would inevitably be crass, would be a violation.  Josh made an attempt at talking, but I don’t think he managed a complete sentence before he tossed the conversational ball: “W-What did you think?”  I just stood up and cleared away our dishes.  Incomplete pass.  Within a few minutes, we were sitting across from each other on the floor, crying, crying, crying.

I got in late for work the next morning.  Josh and I – we hadn’t been able to stop talking.  Bedumbed the night before, now we were bursting.  We stuffed hours talking.  My shower, my breakfast, exercise, devotions: gone.  I did manage to get dressed.  (Praise be.)  The rout continued: within three days I found myself referring to The Thin Red Line as “my favorite film.”  In three days it had supplanted a favorite of nine years.  I was capsized. Overthrown. Demolished. Smitten. Trounced.

It feels like that experience is the best argument I can offer for this film’s sublimity.  It is sublime.  I felt it.  In my gut.   I have never reacted to a film like I reacted to this one.  Not even close.  I know, though, that we could bandy “I loved it”’s and “I hated it”’s forever (and that TRL has gotten plenty of the latter), so I’ll try recommending it with slightly more universal tools than my upturned innards.

I’m going to say two things here: that Line’s departure from genre norms is a good thing, and that its contemplative indeterminacy is timely and wholesome.  If you don’t have much time to read right now, skip to the second section.

Recognizing Home

for Pacifica and for La Mirada

.

After Alice in Wonderland

I discovered something important after Alice in Wonderland.  It is this: Movie-watching-wise, I am an old fart.  I have not seen a new movie recently but I’ve commented on how unnecessarily fast-paced and unattractively chock-full-plotted it was.  (With the exception of Babies.  Babies allowed my apparently dawdling narrative clock to tic away at. its. own.. sweet… rate.)  I finally noticed my trend after watching Alice, and my noticing it as a trend makes me suspicious whether I’ve applied it appropriately to any given movie.  Like this one.  But it was still there, and in force.  ”Too many things not well enough connected happening too quickly only keeping my energy and attention peeled by means of cheap spectacle much like this sentence does!” my soul cried, in an effort toward representation.

And so Alice would have sat dusty, perjured, and categorized in my mind as nothing more than yet another aesthetically stimulating, enjoyable spectacle.  Bang. boom.  Yet, wonder of wonders, it’s stayed standing toward the front of my mind and is proving to be downright meditatable!  comtemplatable!  scrutinizable!  And I have.  Here’s what’s come of it.

My Name: It’s Tops.

No, that was a predicate adjective, not a predicate nominative.  If you apply it like a predicate nominative, you eliminate the import of its serving as a predicate adjective.  So you can just get that idea out of your head right now.

Let me restate myself: In the nominosphere, my name, among all the other names, is simply tops.  It’s eminent, elegant, and sturdy.  It’s one of the things putting me squarely and unabatingly in my parents’ debt.  It’s marvelous.  It’s great.  I like it.

Just feel that cadence!  Two trochees with a stressed foot closing them off!

Just hear that movement! It begins on the highest vowel sound, ‘ee,’ and ends on the lowest, ‘oa!’  An ‘ai’ serves as a perfect mediating third!  The unstressed feet preserve their simplicity with the more neutral “er” and “i!”

Not a single consonant interferes with another; consecutive articulation is kept in radically different locations!

How expansive!  How orderly!  How comfortable!

I Just Don’t Like Things..

..as much as what’s between them.

I love transitions.  I’ve always loved transitions.  I’m infatuated with transitions.  Allow me to sit down and arrange things, and I am happy.  Ask me what those things are, and I may be lost.  I love theories and systematic or synthesizing such-and-suches.  I live for metanarratives, structures, form.

This is often inconvenient.