Tickling the Ivories

…writing to figure out what I think

It’s an absolute mess outside. All the streets but the main throughways are coated and chunked with unscrapable ice islands floating in slush. It is hovering around freezing but the sun is bright enough to accomplish some melting. The gutters of the otherwise clear throughways are ushering the runoff downhill and puddling it at the crosswalks.

As I was driving downtown I saw a girl walking by the Community Rec Center. She was a victim of a splash-by. I could tell because she had on some exercise pants that made the water glisten in the sunlight. It wasn’t just her pants that were wet. Her entire left side was soaked. She was talking on her cellphone. I pulled up to the stoplight at Gilbert and Burlington. There were two cars in front of me and several behind. The splash-by victim was pulling even with my car and I lowered my passenger side window to hear what she was talking about on the phone, whether she was laughing off the unfavorable beginning to her day or whether she was crying to a close friend looking for sympathy. All I could hear was, “Don’t f— walk down Burlington.” I heard a car horn. The stoplight had turned green and the two cars in front of me had obeyed. I was holding up traffic.

I almost stepped into a wide, deep puddle by the Unitarian Universalist Church on Gilbert. A woman just ahead of me who went into the church did the same. I guess your foot still finds some puddles even if your church accepts all faiths as true.

I happened to come home today just in time to see a bit of baseball on the tele

Normally, if I’m home at 4 p.m., I like to watch Pardon the Interruption on ESPN, but today I found the tail end of the Red Sox - Athletics game in its place. Baseball isn’t near my favorite sport to watch, but that seemingly constant presence on just about every channel, the scrolling news ticker, informed me that Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling had taken a no-hitter into the bottom of the 9th inning.

Now, I make no claim to baseball sage-hood, but I know that no-hitters are the diamond’s equivalent of a shooting star—long droughts persist between viewings, if you ever see one at all. Yet, no-hitters are not so uncommon as to relieve them of their significance, as say perfect games are. About all I can say about a perfect game that it is “perfect.” Something which is “perfect” must be pretty important, but since these so-called “perfect” games only seem to occur (in the majors) once a decade or so, I’d rather not bide my time hoping for one—it’s kind of like waiting around for Haley’s Comet to appear&mdashso instead, I’ll happily settle for the next rung down on the pitcher’s list of amazing accomplishments, the no-hitter—the shooting star of the diamond.

I went up and stood in front of the tele and began to pay more attention.

So Schilling (who, incidentally, seems to be as, if not more, known for his opinionated tongue than for his pitching) gets the first batter in the bottom of the 9th to ground out to the shortstop.

1 down, 2 to go.

Schilling (who, incidentally, had never thrown a no-hitter) gets the second batter to ground out to the shortstop in a replay.

2 down, 1 to go.

Schilling (who, incidentally, waved off the original pitch called for by his catcher) throws a single fastball to the next batter and has his no-hit attempt unceremoniously ended by a single to center field.

I could insert some complaints here about how disappointed I was by this, but they would be lies. The truth is that I thought it was comical. The moment the bat touched the ball for the first and only time in the whole game, I had actually turned my head away from the tele. When I looked back, the ball was rolling into the outfielder’s glove and the magic of the game had dissipated. Now instead of watching for a shooting star across the diamond, I was watching for a monumental collapse (it was only 1-0, Red Sox, after all). It reminded me that when one watches any sport, there are essentially only two events to watch for: success and failure.

Even though it was the prospect of great success that tuned me into the game, I left with the reassuringly comic truth of failure.

Schilling’s spectacular effort ended in simple failure. All I could do was laugh.

It seems like there must be theological gold somewhere in this story.

More thoughts from NT Wright .

“…the way to Christian growth is often to allow oneself to be puzzled and startled by new apparent complexity. There is great simplicity at the heart of this picture, but it is costly. The price it demands is sustained attention to the specific, and to us strange and perhaps even repellent, first-century ways of thinking that characterized Jesus. Is it after all Jesus we want to discover and follow, or would we prefer an idol of our own making?”

A great deal of the world prefers one sort or another of an idol. Truly knowing Jesus requires a level of self-abasement that very very very very very very very very few people aspire to.

After all, followers of Jesus are called to be perpetual losers of the battle. Our minds don’t have a category for ideas like this—except for that circular file in the corner.

This is the only moment I have ever wanted to live in the Washington, DC area—just so I could cast a vote for change.
Ham Sandwich For PWC Commonwealth Attorney

Some of what I’ve gleaned from N.T. Wright’s article “How Can the Bible be Authoritative?”

We have often muted Jesus’ stark challenge, remaking him in our own image and then wondering why our personal spiritualities have become less than exciting and life changing

A resonse to the point of view, “We already know everything about the Bible that we need to—knowing Jesus in a historical way is useless…”

Many devout Christians…content themselves with an effortless superiority: we know the truth, these silly liberals have got it all wrong, and we have nothing new to learn.”

On how to approach the Bible…

For me, the dynamic of a commitment to scripture is not “We believe the Bible, so there is nothing more to be learned,” but rather, “We believe the Bible, so we had better discover all the things in it to which our traditions have made us blind.”

Wright perceptively notes that the heresy of Gnosticism is alive and well—perhaps even more than ever. How many times have you been encouraged to “find yourself?” How many people do you know who believe that if they can only find one key piece of knowledge that is currently hidden to them, they will have fulfilled their purpose? That’s what the Gnostics mentioned in the New Testament were all about—salvation through secret knowledge.

On the importance of knowing who Jesus was…

…whenever the church forgets its call to engage in the task of understanding more and more fully who Jesus was, idolatry and ideology lie close at hand.

On the importance of understanding the Bible as a whole, embracing all of its hard edges and messiness.

I remember a well-known preacher saying that he thought a lot of Christians used the Bible as an unsorted edition of Daily Light. It really ought to be arranged into neat little devotional chunks, but it happens to have gotten all muddled up.

…sensitivity to the whole nature of the story and to the ways in which it would be inappropriate simply to repeat verbatim passages from earlier sections…did we ever imagine that the applications of biblical authority ought to be something that could be done by a well programmed computer?

Are we, as followers of Christ sometimes guilty of actually belittling the Bible when we attempt to apply it to our lives?

The world is always trying to lure the church into playing the game by its rules…And the church is all too often eager to do this, not least by using the idea of the authority of scripture as a means to control people, to force them into little boxes. These little boxes often owe far more…to cultural conditions of this or that sort than to scripture itself as the revelation of the loving, creator and redeemer God.

This one is a mega ouch for just about every church I’ve ever been to.

God forgive us that we have taken the Bible and have made it ordinary, that we have cut it down to our size, so that whatever text we preach on it will say basically the same things.

This last illustration almost brought tears to my eyes it’s so right.

“Sit at a piano, hold down the loud pedal, strike a low note loudly, and listen. You will hear all kinds of higher notes, harmonics, shimmering above the note originally struck. In te same way, the retelling of the story that the Bible actually contains is to function as the striking of the low note, the basic fundamental note of God’s story with his world. As we retell this story there will be harmonics audible, for those, at least, with ears to hear. The problem, of course, is that historical criticism of the Bible has insisted on striking the fundamental notes with the soft pedal on, as though by thus screening out the harmonics it might ensure that the fundamental really made its own point—and then Christians have grumbled that such criticism makes the Bible irrelevant. The equal and opposite danger is that pious Christians have only been interested in the harmonics themselves, and then by actually striking them instead of the fundamentals have produced a narrower range of tone, making up in shrillness what it lacks in historical depth and basic substance.”

I think I’ll let that statement be the final word.

Today’s other important event was the release of Wilco’s new album “Sky Blue Sky.”

Oh maaaan it’s luscious. It’s classic. It’s dance-able. It feels good to listen to. Great guitar work. Hummable, yet inventive melodies. What more of a review do you need?

BUY IT!

Who thought it was a good idea to suspend Boris Diaw and Amare Stoudemire?

David “Legalist” Stern, perhaps?

I wonder how the NBA can justify so drastically shifting the dynamic of an already dynamic playoff series. Yes, there is that rule mandating a 1 game suspension to any player who chooses to leave the bench area during a confrontation, presumeably to take part in a brewing confrontation. But shouldn’t one take into account the fact that neither Stoudemire nor Diawactually took part in anything?

It really burns my biscuits to know that the league has mandated that the Suns, for all intents and purposes, cannot defend Tim Duncan. It’s almost as if they have issued a restraining order against the entire Suns team on behalf of Tim “Demon Deacon” Duncan. And what’s more, this punishment is actually the result of a cheap shot maliciously taken by a Spurs player.

What a sad prank.

I’m reading an essay (How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?) by the British theologian N.T. Wright. I’m not familiar with the range of his work or where he fits into the larger theological spectrum, but I can appreciate his thought provoking points.

Let me ruin the suspense right away and say that Wright’s argument concludes that evangelicals actually give too little weight to Scripture—this isn’t a thought that is intuitive to me given my experience and insider knowledge of an evangelical’s approach to the Bible (those last 5 words sound like some sort of self-help manual). It’s comforting to know that he’s affirming the “authority” of scripture—it’s intriguing to know that he’s re-thinking the definition of “authority.”

But much of what we call the Bible—the Old and New Testaments—is not a rule book; it is narrative. That raises a further question: How can an ancient narrative text be authoritative? How, for instance, can the book of Judges, or the book of Acts, be authoritative? It is one thing to go to your commanding officer first thing in the morning and have a string of commands barked at you. But what would you do if, instead, he began, “Once upon a time”?

More as I read more.

…here is how the article turned out that I was telephoned to quote for yesterday.
Contraception giveaway aims to educate

… is my album of the week. It is Bruce Springteen’s finest record among his earlier material. I know “Born to Run” has that triumphant vibe to it, but “Darkness…” is so much more fulfilling as a whole—it is more ambitious, proves that Bruce can rip shredding and short, yet high impact, guitar solos, introduces his classic cast of working class characters who work in the factory all day and race cars at night;—what else do i need to say? It’s The Boss being The Boss at its best!