——

Russia fired a wave of air strikes across eastern Ukraine last night, killing four—including three toddlers—in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Bohodukhiv. A Russian drone struck their house as part of a broader strike on the area that also injured two people, including a pregnant woman. The night before, in the eastern Ukrainian city of Slovyansk, a Russian aerial assault killed two other people, an 11-year-old girl and her mother, and injured at least 16 others, including a 7-year-old child.

——

Omar El Akkad:

An eighteen-month-old with a bullet wound to the forehead. Maybe the sniper was aiming elsewhere. Maybe there’s some explanation. Maybe it was necessary.

——

Madeleine L’Engle (an entire poem not easily quotable):

And a second time he spoke
when the Lord kept the children beside him
and suffered them not to be taken away:
“These are the ones that are left us,
but where, Lord, is the Kingdom of Heaven?
Where, Lord, are the others?
What of them? What of them?”
And he wept.

——

Headlines and stories regularly beg the question: are we Les Murray’s “fellow crying in Martin Place” or somewhere in the crowd? Do we fear the all-acceptance, or will we receive the gift?

… the hollow he makes about him
in the midday light, in his pentagram of sorrow,
and uniforms back in the crowd who tried to seize him
stare out at him, and feel, with amazement, their minds
longing for tears as children for a rainbow.

[…]

… the slickest wit amongst us

trembles with silence, and burns with unexpected
judgements of peace. Some in the concourse scream
who thought themselves happy. Only the smallest children
and such as look out of Paradise come near him
and sit at his feet, with dogs and dusty pigeons.

Ridiculous, says a man near me, and stops
his mouth with his hands, as if it uttered vomit — 
and I see a woman, shining, stretch her hand
and shake as she receives the gift of weeping;
as many as follow her also receive it

and many weep for sheer acceptance, and more
refuse to weep for fear of all acceptance,
but the weeping man, like the earth, requires nothing,
the man who weeps ignores us, and cries out
of his writhen face and ordinary body

not words, but grief, not messages, but sorrow,
hard as the earth, sheer, present as the sea —
and when he stops, he simply walks between us
mopping his face with the dignity of one
man who has wept, and now has finished weeping.

Evading believers, he hurries off down Pitt Street.

——

(Still, still, still, still not for me.)

Interview with Carmen Imes:

So I’m curious across this trilogy that you’ve written, how your views have changed or modified in the process of writing these books. Are there things on which you’ve found yourself shifting such that now, at the end of this journey you’ve been on with these three books, you find yourself in a different place just maybe theologically or the way you see the Bible?

I do think one shift has been a growing awareness of how the same message can land differently in different communities. So, bearing God’s name — in that book, I’m arguing that every believer has been stamped with God’s name or claimed by God as belonging to God’s family. And so, therefore, we should live in alignment with that, we should represent Him well.

And I noticed when I was speaking at a Chinese seminary last year that there was some pushback to that. There was a sense of: this is too much like the pressure that our parents put on us to perform in order to keep up the honor for our family. And I realized that it could be received more as pressure than invitation. Whereas in a very white Western context, the problem is we think: my faith is just between me and God and it’s nobody else’s business. And so I was wanting to say, no, look, we belong to each other and what you do, the way you live matters for faith. But I think in an Asian context, actually, the emphasis might need to be in a different direction. There might need to be different framing of that.

So one friend suggested that maybe I should have used the illustration from Toy Story where Andy is the boy, and he’s got all these toys, and you’re watching the toys go through this adventure. And there’s a part in the movie where Woody, the favorite toy, gets separated from Andy, and yet he proves that he still belongs to Andy. And he goes through this crisis where he rediscovers his belonging to Andy by looking at the bottom of his shoe where it says “Andy.” So maybe that’s a less pressureful way of thinking about bearing God’s name.

So that’s one place I’ve shifted. I still believe in the message of bearing God’s name, but I’m realizing that for different contexts, it might need a different framing.

Frederick Buechner:

3. If you have even as much as a nodding acquaintance with a foreign language, try reading the Bible in that. Then you stand a chance of hearing what the Bible is actually saying instead of what you assume it must be saying because it is the Bible. Some of it you may hear in such a new way that it is as if you had never heard it before. “Blessed are the meek” is the way the English version goes, whereas in French it comes out, “Heureux sont les debonnaires” (“Happy are the debonair”). The debonair of all things! Doors fly open. Bells ring out.

I have never been able to decide how I feel about M. S. Merwin’s poem “For the Anniversary of My Death.” Moved at first, I always put it back having possibly changed my mind.

I am, of course, stirred by the thought of having passed the anniversary of my own death every year without knowing it. And I do love what he does with death as that moment when “after three days of rain / Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease.” And I also appreciate everything that Pádraig Ó Tuama recently said about the poem.

As a whole, however, I’m never certain.

But whatever it is that makes me keep that poem at arms length, whatever it is that’s missing or off, those hesitations are completely gone in Gary Lawless’s poem “Some Clear Night.”

Some clear night like this,
when the stars are all out and shining,
our old dogs will come back to us,
out of the woods, and lead us
along the stone wall to the cove.
There will be foxes, and loons,
and a houseboat floating on the lake.
The trees will lean in, a lantern
swinging over the water, the creaking of oars.
Now we will learn the true names of the stars.
Now we will know what the trees are saying.
There is wood in the stove.
We left the front door open.
Does the farmhouse know
that we’re never coming back?

It’s so similar, isn’t it? Yet Lawless’s poem has so much more warmth and at-homeness. There is wood in the stove and the door is left (invitingly!) open, but it isn’t just those lines.

I came across that today in a collection of poems from Maine. A funny thing is, I’ve talked to Gary many times, always briefly, about books and authors, at his store in Brunswick.

I wonder how he’ll feel about this.

This is a piece of art I picked up at the thrift store the other day, one that I kept picking up and putting back and returning to to stare at. It’s some sort of long stitch embroidery. And I love it.

And it’s so fitting. Two Christmases ago I stumbled across Christopher Alexander’s 1979 The Timeless Way of Building in our local bookstore, though I’ve only recently been spending any real time in it. I had never heard of him but I knew within seconds it was something worth the $60 price.

To seek the timeless way we must first know the quality without a name.

The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person, and the crux of any individual persons story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.

We can identify the towns and buildings, streets and gardens, flower beds, chairs, tables, table cloths, wine bottles, garden seats, and kitchen sinks which have this quality— simply by asking whether they are like us when we are free.

We need only ask ourselves which places—which towns, which buildings, which rooms, have made us feel like this—which of them have that breath of sudden passion in them, which whispers to us, and let us recall those moments when we were ourselves.

And the connection between the two—between this quality in our own lives, and the same quality in our surroundings—is not just an analogy, or similarity. The fact is that each one creates the other.

Places which have this quality, invite this quality to come to life in us. And when we have this quality in us, we tend to make it come to life in towns and buildings which we help to build. It is a self-supporting, self-maintaining, generating quality. It is the quality of life, and we must seek it, for our own sakes, in our surroundings, simply in order that we can ourselves become alive.

A man is alive when he is wholehearted, true to himself, true to his own inner forces, and able to act freely according to the nature of the situations he is in. …

To be happy, and to be alive, in this sense, are almost the same … and above all, the man is whole; and conscious of being real.

This state cannot be reached merely by inner work.

There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need to only inner work, in order to be alive like this; that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that cure himself, he need only change himself. This teaching has some value, since it is so easy for a man to imagine that his problems are caused by “others.” But it is a one-sided and mistaken view which also maintains the arrogance of the belief that the individual is self-sufficient, and not dependent in any way on his surroundings.

The fact is, a person is so far formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.

Workshops mix with houses, children run around the places where the work is going on, the members of the family help in the work, the family may possibly eat lunch together, or eat lunch together with the people who are working there.

The fact that family and play are part of one continuous stream, helps nourish everyone. Children see how work happens, they learn what it is that makes the adult world function, they get an overall coherent view of things; men are able to connect the possibility of play and laughter, and attention to children, without having to separate them sharply in their minds, from work. Men and women are able to work, and to pay attention to their families more or less equally, as they wish to; love and work are connected, able to be one, understood and felt as coherent by the people who are living there.

And when a building has this fire, then it becomes a part of nature. Like ocean waves, or blades of grass, its parts are governed by the endless play of repetition and variety created in the presence of the fact that all things pass. This is the quality itself.

David Zahl:

Play describes a way of being in the world that divine grace makes possible—a way that is dynamic and delight-filled, outward-oriented yet faithful. As such, it represents an urgent if tragically undertapped opportunity for Christian witness to a world drowning in dreariness. Those who champion grace might do well to champion play as a response to it. […]

The blessed assurance of grace announces that the high-wire game of proving ourselves is finished. By grace, the lingering threat of judgment has been removed, establishing precisely the sort of safety that Burghardt’s definition requires for a person to play, albeit on a deeper, existential level. What this means is that, when it comes to God, the Christian is set free from the spur of necessity and can enter into a new relation of play. Nigerian theologian Nimi Wariboko connects the dots when he writes, “The logic of grace is the logic of play.” 

In more gut-level terms, the key question of the Christian life becomes one of freedom: What would you do, what risk would you take, what would you say if you weren’t afraid? What would you do if you truly believed your standing with God was secure, the ultimate threat of judgment was removed, and you didn’t have to do anything? How would you spend your time and energy if you could undertake something for the sheer joy of doing it rather than any outcome it might produce? 

These are scary questions, but I suspect their answers have something to do with exercising the unique gifts God has given each of us. We may even find ourselves free to think of others and their well-being rather than anxiously safeguarding our own. 

Fortunately, a theology of play is built on more than the absence of judgment. It also takes seriously Christ’s exalting of children. In Matthew 18:2–3, we read how Jesus “called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’” There are many ways to interpret his words: as an invitation to humility, as a beatitudinal valorization of the least, as a rebuke to the social hierarchies of the day. But certainly an endorsement of childlikeness should make the list. The only thing children do is play. At least, that’s what they do after their immediate needs are provided for—and before extracurriculars get ahold of them. There is no becoming like a child that does not involve play. […]

If play is truly an essential dimension of a Spirit-driven Christian life, a sense of humor is not spiritually negligible. Silliness and self-deprecation become not just virtues but acts of resistance in a world (and a church) that enshrines productivity more with each passing day. You will know them not just by their works of love but by the “useless” laughter that accompanies those works. 

Peco Gaskovski (quoted a little out of order):

Despite our astonishment at her opinion and excessive hot-takery, we didn’t stand up in self-righteous outrage and throw our young guest out of the house. We, the hosts, always expect to encounter some unusual perspectives during our supper salons. We have no intention of dismissing people and ruining relationships just because of a deviant opinion or two. The food and music also help. Outrage just doesn’t happen in the presence of beef lasagna and Frank Sinatra Live at Madison Square Garden.

I’m less concerned about what happens at our supper salons, than with what is happening in the world. Much of the internet has devolved into a gossip and confabulation machine, and AI only amplifies the half-truths and general loudmouthery in the public discourse, making it harder to see truth. Not that seeing truth was ever easy, of course.

[…]

[People grow beliefs the way June lawns grow dandelions. It can’t be helped. And every civilization is plagued with these cognitive dandelions, which send out spores that float away, land, proliferate into new dandelions. This is the way of the world. My mother grew up in a poor Balkan village where, during its heyday from around 500 A.D. (when the Slavic migrations arrived) to around 1960 A.D. (when everybody started immigrating to the West), people lived small intertwined lives, in mud-brick homes scattered around a nameless river that was just called “the river”, and everybody knew everybody.]

Villages have their priests, or maybe a wise old babushka, who can tell it to you straight. All societies need authority. At the level of civilization, authority used to belong to the Church, and later belonged to the State, and is now split between the State and a handful of vape-smoking twenty-something-year-old billionaires with a knack for coding.

Michael Taylor:

Davos is usually a place for polished platitudes, carefully manicured optimism, and the occasional nervous billionaire pretending to care deeply about the planet. Into this alpine shrine to seriousness strode Trump, carrying not policy, not vision, but vibes. Strong vibes. Tremendous vibes. Possibly the best vibes anyone has ever brought to Switzerland.

From the outset, the speech felt less like an address to global leaders and more like a rally held in an echo chamber. There were boasts untethered from facts, grievances aired as if the audience were a captive jury, and digressions that appeared to be chasing one another around the podium like startled chickens. […]

One could almost hear the collective internal monologue of the audience: Is this… the speech? Diplomats stared with the fixed smiles of people trapped in a lift with someone explaining crypto. CEOs blinked slowly, recalculating their life choices. Somewhere in the Alps, a cow likely stopped chewing.

And yet, the most remarkable thing about the address was Trump’s apparent certainty that it had gone well. In his mind, no doubt, it was flawless – historic, even. The laughter (if any) would be interpreted as admiration. The discomfort as awe. The silence as respect.

Davos will move on, as it always does. Panels will panel. Declarations will be declared. But Trump’s speech will linger as a reminder that failure, when paired with supreme self-confidence, does not always recognise itself as failure.

Which, in its own strange way, may have been the most honest part of the performance.

Frank Bruni (via Tipsy Teetotaler):

I’m feeling dark, so no playful notes today. Just this: I never, ever want to hear the phrase “Trump derangement syndrome” again.

There is no derangement among those of us horrified by Trump. There never was. There was simply honest recognition of a spectacularly dishonest and disgraceful bully who showed his colors from the start, before his first election to the presidency, when he mocked John McCain’s years of confinement and torture as a prisoner of war, when he mused about some gun enthusiast taking a shot at Hillary Clinton, when he commenced the refrain of his political life — “rigged,” “rigged,” “rigged” — before his Electoral College victory proved the opposite. He was as ready then to lay waste to democratic traditions and institutions as he is now. He was the same aspiring autocrat, just with less practice and power.

“Derangement syndrome” itself should go away. It’s a glib, hyperbolic dismissal of substantive concerns. People on the right who repeatedly raised alarms about Biden’s cognition and health were accused of “Biden derangement syndrome,” but beneath the exaggerations and gracelessness in which some of them indulged were rational observations. “Derangement syndrome,” like so much else these days, shuts down meaningful debate, turning it into so much mud slinging.

With Trump, language has been challenging. There was the period of respectful, reflexive disinclination to use “lies” or “lying,” until the growing tower of euphemisms and synonyms toppled under its own absurdity. “Fascist” was a red line that’s now receiving something of a green light.

“Until recently, I resisted using the F-word to describe President Trump,” Jonathan Rauch wrote in The Atlantic about a week ago, later adding: “Reluctance to use the term has now become perverse. That is not because of any one or two things he and his administration have done but because of the totality. Fascism is not a territory with clearly marked boundaries but a constellation of characteristics. When you view the stars together, the constellation plainly appears.”

How I wish I could label that assessment deranged.