Brick

This will be brief, it's late and I have to write a post for tomorrow.

Plus, I'm more than a little downhearted at the non-response to my Heroes post. Evidently you all aren't the culturally affluent people I thought you were. Enjoy Mondays for the next 6 months you yellow-bellied sapsuckers. For shame.

40 Days For Life

Today marks the beginning of the 40 Days For Life campaign, an interdenominational effort to organize the thoughts, prayers, and acts of service of individuals throughout North America trying to end abortion.

I'll be volunteering to pray for an hour a week or so in front of Planned Parenthood. If you are passionate about this topic (and if you aren't passionate you should at least spend some time thinking about why you aren't) you might think of doing the same. If you live in a major U.S. city, then chances are your church is participating, if not, it's not as though you can't think and pray about life-related issues wherever you're at.

I'll probably make remarks on abortion regularly throughout the next forty days, but I'm going to do my best to avoid the term "pro-life". Why? Because I know that there is no sane human being out there who wants to kill babies. The abortion question is not a disagreement at all about whether human life has value, but a disagreement about when human life begins. While defining a period where life begins inherently erodes human dignity, it doesn't mean that there is a faction somewhere that just hates babies.

I personally will continue to err on the side of caution as far as tampering with human life and procreation goes and would encourage you to do the same, but I'm going to try to stay away from mud-slinging, name-calling, etc.

For today all I really have for you is Ben Fold's song "Brick," which is a true story about his reaction after his highschool girlfriend's abortion. Give it a good listen and let me know what you think.

Embedding is disabled so YouTube it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axpuVLQ_m4w

Or just listen to the playlist on the sidebar.

Lyrics:
Six am day after Christmas,
I throw some clothes on in the dark.
The smell of cold,
Car seat is freezing,
The world is sleeping and
I am numb

Up the stairs to her apartment
She is balled up on the couch
Her mom and dad went down to Charlotte
They're not home to find us out
And we drive
Now that I have found someone
I'm feeling more alone
Than I ever have before

She's a brick and I'm drowning slowly
Off the coast and I'm headed nowhere
Shes a brick and I'm drowning slowly...

They call her name at 7:30
I pace around the parking lot
Then I walk down to buy her flowers
And sell some gifts that I got
Cant you see
It's not me you're dying for
Now she's feeling more alone
Than she ever has before

Chorus

As weeks went by
It showed that she was not fine
They told me son it's time
To tell the truth
And she broke down and I broke down
Cause I was tired of lying.


Driving back to her apartment,
For the moment we're alone,
She's alone,
And I'm alone,
Now I know it.

Chorus

Not The Same

“'See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his people,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.'
And the one who was seated on the throne said, 'See I am making all things new.'”
- Revelation 21:3b-5a

I Believe I'm a Walking Contradiction

Today's post is long, but I think it's worth it, and, if you're feeling lost, be sure you read yesterday's: Same Old Thing.

Today I started class by challenging my students with the quotation that began yesterday's post. I asked them to tell me one thing that had happened in the last 2500 years that would have surprised the writer of Ecclesiastes - one entirely new aspect of humanity that he never could have dreamed of.

First came answers like “the microwave” and “the internet,” but I pointed out that the microwave and the internet are just new ways to cook and share information, things humans have always done. After more thought they put forth “the moon landing” and “the atom bomb,” and again I reminded them that death, suffering, and pain, the discovery of harsh and alien landscapes were very old experiences, and that the atom bomb and moon landing differed from their antecedents only in magnitude, not in kind.

Finally, two students kicked the discussion up a notch by posing two important questions: “What about miracles?” and “What about individuals?”

Honestly, they had stumped me, especially since I teach at a public school and am therefore relatively limited as to what assertions I can make.

While the laws of nature are universal in every time and place, I believe, if I believe in the gospel, that at some point God utterly violated those laws and changed everything, forever. That much I had to admit, as well as that while human nature itself might be entirely universal (we are all born, we all learn, to love or desire family and friends, we labor, we fall in love, we reproduce and we die) the individual is just that: unique and therefore of inestimable value.

When the author of Ecclesiastes composed this passage he neither had a conception of the spiritual transaction that would take place during the crucifixion of Christ, nor did he have the fullness of the gift of the Holy Spirit that we experience now. In a sense, those things are entirely new, but I'd like to consider them in light of the comment Katie made on yesterday's post. She suggested that somehow, even if we weren't privy to the knowledge, the nature of God has always been the sole factor in determining what constitutes reality. God was always three persons: Maker, Redeemer, and Advocate.

Moreover, God doesn't look at time like we do, he doesn't see a linear progression in human knowledge. In the same way that we can't see or conceive of a mono-dimensional object (with only length, width or height), I doubt, except insofar as he condescends to our own time-based minds and senses, that God really notices a thing like time at all.

I love Catholicism, and Christianity in general, for a number of reasons, but perhaps the foremost among these is the fact they not only accept, but embrace as doctrine, and even worship, contraries which blatantly oppose logic.

For example: that God is one nature and three persons, that Christ is 100% man and 100% God, that the Eucharist is actually the body and blood of Christ despite having every discernible-by-sense-data quality of bread and wine, and most importantly that God was just when he accepted the life of an innocent man as a ransom for those worthy of death.

While Christ did come at a specific time for a specific purpose, and in doing so totally changed our conception of human nature, in many ways his coming is so absolutely perfect that we can't imagine history without it. He seems to be the deus ex machina, but could we really make sense of anything that had happened before or after Christ without him? We were always the redeemed people. We were always children of God, but he decided, in true heroic fashion, to let us lose him, so that he might win us.

But, is the beauty of the thing an adequate justification for believing it to be true? Can I rest assured that because God did what appears to be the most beautiful thing, that the facts of the matter can defy logic?

Let me know what you think, and listen to today's song; it's by Ben Folds and describes an especially strange story of conversion.