I’m not much good tonight, I fear. Got into a spot of pother over on Basefook, and it’s interfering with my concentration. I’ll tell you more later … or maybe not.
Anyway, here’s one of my favorite hymns — “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go,” by the blind pastor George Matheson, who has to be my favorite hymn writer (terrible admission for a Lutheran), because he has only 2 famous hymns, and both are at or near the top of my list.
Have a good evening, and pray for me if it crosses your mind.
Today, after much soul-searching and delay, I made up my mind to go to a certain well-known men’s clothier and buy a suit. More than that, I allowed myself to be talked into ordering what’s known as a “bespoke” suit – cut to my size and tailored for my peculiar personal form. The waiting time will be more than a month.
You see, I’ve got a little money coming in, and I’ve frequently felt the incongruity of the fact that, for all my talk about men dressing decently, my own (only) suit is rather shabby. It’s a point of traditional wisdom that a “decent” suit is not an extravagance. A man ought to be prepared to present himself respectably when it’s called for.
My suit will be a rich, elegant black, so that I can wear it with my customary black Victorian vests.
Black is the traditional color associated with Pietism and Puritanism (though the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, generally depicted in illustrations in severe black suits, actually liked bright colors. And their hats were not tall and stiff, but soft).
I’ve been reading about my own Pietist roots, in Thomas E. Jacobson’s recent book, Pain In the Belly. It’s about the Norwegian pietist Haugean movement, especially its history in the United States. I’ll be reviewing it once I finish it, but one thing strikes me already:
Author Jacobson (who happens to be a friend of mine) likes to describe the conservatives, the party who wanted to follow the patterns of the old Norwegian state church, as “objective,” since they emphasized the efficacy of the sacraments, in which God does all the work and we are mere recipients of His grace.
My people, the pietist Haugeans, he describes as “subjective,” since we emphasized the necessity of a personal experience with Christ. We were suspicious of anyone who said their relationship with God was confined to receiving the sacraments. If faith is real, we argued, the individual will be transformed, and there will necessarily be an emotional component.
I’m not accustomed to thinking of us Haugeans as subjectivists. I’ve been a strong opponent of subjectivism in the church since college.
And yet the description is perfectly fair. I’m used to thinking of the subjective as just mushy emotionalism, but it doesn’t have to be. Real life is, in fact, a combination of the objective and the subjective, just as it involves the combination of the physical and the spiritual.
But this led to a further puzzling thought.
We Haugeans are often accused of Pharisaism, but Pharisaism is a defect of objective theology. The Pharisee makes a list of his duties, checks each item off the list, and considers himself square with God.
Haugeans are the opposite. We emphasize the passion of faith, total submission in all areas of life.
And yet, it’s not unfair to compare us to Pharisees. We do tend to get obsessed with lists of rules, as means of demonstrating our inner piety. I comment extensively on this characteristic in my novel, Troll Valley.
Perhaps the bottom line is that nothing human is entirely one thing or another.
Today was Sverdrup Forum Day. Our annual Georg Sverdrup Society meeting for students of our seminary, and others interested, in which papers are read and discussion encouraged.
I usually read an extract from one of my translations of Sverdrup’s works, but this year somebody else did that duty, and I was asked to do opening devotions instead.
I’ve written before about my phobia concerning praying in public. But I wrote it all out ahead of time, and read it from my printed text. That was not a problem.
I ran short, time-wise, but not by accident. I knew, from experience, that these shebangs tend to run long. Nobody complained about my brevity, and the forum, as it happened, ended almost precisely on schedule.
[Insert here labored metaphor about the concept of brevity and its application to life.]
As I’ve told you, I just finished translating a literary biography.
A question occurred to me – “Is there such a thing as a genuinely good biography that isn’t sad?”
I once read (I think) a quotation by Oscar Wilde (can’t find it online, so maybe it’s one of those made-up things. Still good): “Tragedy is comedy plus time.”
In other words, you can make any comedy a tragedy by just leaving the curtain up. In the end, everybody dies, just like in Hamlet.
You’ve got two choices in a death. It can be too soon, or too late. There never seems to be a perfect time.
Most of us look forward to a long life. But that often means a slow decline as health problems increase, and friends die, and the world gradually turns alien and dangerous around us.
I just wrote a novel where two main characters die Viking deaths.
There’s something to be said for that.
Does this mean I’m ready to go now, while I’m still ambulatory and not wearing a diaper?
Are you kidding? No way.
It’s always dangerous when I’m between book reviews. Sometimes my thoughts coagulate, like milk in the sunshine, and in desperation I record those curds on this blog.
The problem with me (well, one of many problems) is that, like many writers, I think I’m smarter than I am. People actually read what I write, which tends to give a guy a big head, even at my low level of readership.
My thoughts today conducted me on a strange road from colonial America to the Infernal Regions. I am not at all sure that any part of that road is worth sharing. Might even do more harm than good.
But let’s see how it goes.
In my reading, I came upon a reference to the Konkapot River in Massachusetts.
This reminded me of a poem I read as a boy. I later learned that it was an epitaph written by no less a figure than Abraham Lincoln, for a Kickapoo Indian friend:
Here lies poor Johnny Kongapod;
Have mercy on him, gracious God,
As he would do if he was God
And you were Johnny Kongapod.
I had also read references to a Native American named John Konkapot, whom I had assumed to be the man the poem was written for. But that isn’t so. The Konkapot River is named after that original John Konkapot, a Mohican of the Stockbridge tribe who converted to Christianity and was highly esteemed by the white community. The picture at the top of this post is a study by Norman Rockwell, never completed, in which John Konkapot talks with the missionary Rev. John Sargent. Sargent’s wife, who mistrusted the Native Americans, peeks around the corner in concern.
But Lincoln’s Johnny Kongapod was a different person, perhaps named after the original guy.
But that’s just the preliminaries. My actual concern tonight is Lincoln’s poem. One remembers (I reviewed a book on the subject) that Lincoln was an atheist and a free-thinker for much of his life. He had been raised in a hyper-Calvinist Baptist denomination, where they taught that most people were hopelessly damned from birth. Such a teaching did not appeal to his essentially humane, ironical cast of mind.
Why would God send Johnny Kongapod to Hell, Lincoln asks. Johnny wouldn’t do that to Him.
I could write all night on that subject. The main answer, of course, is that God is God. He knows more than Johnny Kongapod. Or Lincoln, even.
And my main response personally has always been, “Heaven is the place where we’re filled with joy in beholding the Lord face to face. If you don’t like the Lord, why would you want to go there?”
It’s conceivable that Heaven and Hell are the same place. But the Beatific Vision that makes it wonderful for God’s children makes it unbearable for those who have eyes but will not see.
And lately I’ve been contemplating the Old Testament Sheol, which is Chaos, the primordial sea over which the Spirit of God hovers at creation. Perhaps Hell isn’t fire, but water. But I’m not sure about that, and don’t know whether it heads anywhere worthwhile.
A new year. My… well, the number for me is over 70th… trip around the great nuclear furnace.
I was going to do a post about where I’m standing in terms of my work – that I seem to be on track with my translation (I worked a little late last night to meet a personal deadline). That I’ve been temporarily sidelined in my effort to get Troll Valley into paperback. I was going to mention that I’m recovering pretty well from my eye surgery, feeling better every day.
But that will do for that stuff.
It occurred to me to mention something I learned recently – or think I learned. (One is never sure, in matters spiritual.)
It’s about prayer.
I’ve never been very good with prayer. I’ve told you more than once that I have no stage fright (an abnormal condition). The one exception is that I hate praying in public. I hate doing that. I always feel I’m doing it wrong, that I’m sounding foolish, that I’m… embarrassing God, somehow.
It’s not quite as bad with private prayer, for me. I do that regularly. But I’ve never felt my prayers counted for much. I felt my prayers were small and weak things, set up against the great evil and sadness of the fallen world.
However, I had a thought recently that may have some relevance. Maybe it will be helpful to others.
If you recall, a while back I was rhapsodizing about how the science of physics seems (in my ignorance) to feed into theology. I actually forget the details, but it was pretty heady stuff for me. Waves and particles, and how the created universe is like a story or a song. All proclaiming the character of their Creator.
Anyway, it occurred to me to think that when I pray, I’m not there alone in front of God. I’m part of a great wave, a great song, a great dance. I’m not creating anything, I’m not composing something out of my own material. I’m just joining in. Participating in an ongoing story – or hymn. Or dance. Whatever. It’s not on me alone.
The call goes out – “Join the dance!” And I join.
I like that. It helps me relax when I pray.
Still can’t handle the public praying, though.
A blessed new year to you.
We make the Puritans picturesque in a way they would violently repudiate, in novels and plays they would have publicly burnt. We are interested in everything about them, except the only thing in which they were interested at all…. About the Puritans we can find no great legend. We must put up as best we can with great literature.
Anyone approaching G.K. Chesterton’s A Short History of England in the hope of learning many facts is likely to be sadly disappointed. I expect Chesterton himself would have been astonished at the very expectation – in his day, anyone who bought a Chesterton book knew he’d be getting a polemic. A witty polemic that might be very illuminating – even if one disagrees with the premises – but the author assumes a fair knowledge of the dates and facts from the outset. What Chesterton offers is a fresh perspective.
In this relatively short, very superficial overview of English history, the author has two advantages in creating his provocations – first of all, he’s G.K. Chesterton, a man who forever looked at the world as if in a fun house mirror or a photographic negative; and secondly that he’s a Catholic, a perpetual outsider in a land of lapsed Protestants.
Sometimes he can be surprising – he seems to anticipate interpretations of events that were unusual at the time, but are commonplace today – such as that the Saxon invaders in Arthur’s time may have only been an aristocratic minority.
As Chesterton sees it, England went wrong at two major junctures (aside from the Reformation, something he thinks self-evident) – when Richard II lost his bid to reform the government, and when, more recently, England began to ally itself with the Germans. He is writing, of course, as World War I rages, and is comforted by the fact that England is once again allied with France, which he considers a much more fitting combination.
I do recommend A Short History of England, but only if you already know a good deal of English history. (I’ll admit a lot of the names were unfamiliar to me, too.)
I’ve told this story here before, but it was a long time back. For me, it’s as good an illustration of the Incarnation, the meaning of Christmas, as any I’ve ever heard.
I heard it from an old man I met some years back. He passed away several years ago. His father had been a pastor in what was the predecessor organization to my church body. The events happened when he was a boy – I suppose it must have been in the 1930s or ’40s.
They lived in a small town in the Upper Midwest. My friend (I’ll call him John) was a teenager at the time, and feeling his oats. Some kind of entertainment event (John did not specify) was coming to their town, and John announced one night at the supper table that he intended to go to it.
“You will not go to that event,” his father told him. “It would cause a scandal in our congregation.”
John stuck his chin out. “I don’t care,” he said. “I’m going, and you can’t stop me.”
His father gazed at him a moment. Finally he said, “You’re right. You’re old enough now that I can’t stop you. But understand this. If you disobey me by going to this event, when you come back here afterward, you’ll find the house locked against you. You’ll have to find some other place to sleep that night.”
John said he didn’t care. When the day came, he went to the event. “I honestly can’t remember,” he told me, “whether I had a good time or not. But I’ll never forget what happened when I went home.”
He found the house locked, as his father had promised. Front door. Back door. Side door. Even that window in the basement that was always unlatched if you needed it in an emergency – tonight it was hooked up tight.
Where could he go? All the neighbors were in bed.
He thought about their chicken house. Their family kept chickens to stretch their budget with eggs and meat. Inside the chicken coop there was a little loft, and the kids had made a play space up there. They’d left an old quilt on the floor.
He went out to the chicken coop. Climbed the ladder to the loft.
The floor was bare. Someone had removed the quilt.
At least he was under a roof. He lay down and tugged his jacket up around his neck. He shivered and breathed in the ammonia smell of chicken droppings, preparing for a long night.
He lay there for some time.
At last he heard the coop door creaking open. Quiet steps crossed the floor. The ladder creaked as someone climbed up to him.
In the darkness he felt a quilt being wrapped around him. Then strong arms enfolded him and held him, laying down behind him.
In his ear, he heard his father’s voice:
“Son, when I told you that if you disobeyed me you’d have to sleep outside, I never said that I’d be sleeping inside.”
A blessed Christmas to you all.
It’s Christmas Eve. Very likely Christmas Day (or later) by the time you see it. Consider this your Christmas greeting from me.
I’m sure I’ve posted this song before (though perhaps not this performance), but I consider it one of the most beautiful Scandinavian Christmas songs out there. If I post it enough, maybe Americans will catch on to it. If not, you’ll have the satisfaction of being among the few, the proud, the Initiated.
God became man. Without in any way questioning the primacy of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, I have long noted that the great heresies almost always began by getting the Incarnation wrong. So it’s perfectly all right to make a big day of this one.
God jul, as we Norwegians say.
My second day after eye surgery. (It was a detached retina, I might as well admit.) I have no reason to complain. I can go about my life moderately well (though my depth perception, never the best, is pretty poor right now). I am in very minor discomfort, not pain. Just enough to make me grumpy, if I took the trouble to be around people to be grumpy at. Give it time.
The little two-hymn medley above from a young Sissel Kyrkjebø is included on her classic Christmas album, Glade Jul, which sold almost as many copies as there are people in Norway. The first one is Det Kimer Nå Til Julefest ([Bells] Ring Now for the Christmas Celebration). The lyrics are by the Danish preacher and author N.F.S. Grundtvig. The second is Jeg Synger Julekvad (I Sing a Christmas Song), which is, I believe, more of a folk hymn. Both hymns are offered with subtitles, apparently done by AI and not always to be relied upon.
Have a blessed weekend.
First of all, I feel I should warn you (the horror!) that it’s possible I may not be posting tomorrow. I am scheduled for minor surgery involving my vision, and will just have to see whether I’m in shape to work a computer or not.
I would appreciate your prayers if you think of it, but they assure me it’s a common procedure and the risks are low. (At least that’s how I choose to interpret it.)
So, tonight – another Christmas carol. Not Sissel, I’m afraid. She doesn’t seem to have done this one. There are performances by the Heretic Tabernacle Choir, but I don’t want to give them more business than I already have done. There are English choir versions, but the English sing it to the wrong tune (I believe that was a major reason for the unpleasantness of 1776).
At last I found a nice one by the Hillsdale College Choir. That will do.
I remember that when I was a kid, my first favorite Christmas hymn was “Away in the Manger” (erroneously believed, at the time, to have been written by Martin Luther). It’s a kid’s carol, and one of the first songs I ever learned by heart.
Then, some years later, I remember, I decided I preferred “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”
I’ve gone on to other favorite Christmas hymns since that time, but I still favor the Little Town, in a general way.
It was written by Phillips Brooks (1835-1893), an Episcopal priest who eventually became bishop of Massachusetts. (According to Wikipedia, he introduced Helen Keller to both Christianity and Annie Sullivan.) He said he wrote it after visiting the Holy Land, and Bethlehem on Christmas night. I recall reading an anecdote that after his death, a little girl in his congregation is supposed to have said, “How happy the angels will be to have him in Heaven!”