Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Come On Get Higher

I miss the sound of your voice
And I miss the rush of your skin
And I miss the still of the silence
As you breathe out and I breathe in

If I could walk on water
If I could tell you what's next
I'd make you believe
I'd make you forget

So come on, get higher, loosen my lips
Faith and desire and the swing of your hips
Just pull me down hard
And drown me in love
So come on, get higher, loosen my lips
Faith and desire and the swing of your hips
Just pull me down hard
And drown me in love

I miss the sound of your voice
Loudest thing in my head
And I ache to remember
All the violent, sweet
Perfect words that you said

If I could walk on water
If I could tell you what's next
I'd make you believe
I'd make you forget

So come on, get higher, loosen my lips
Faith and desire and the swing of your hips
Just pull me down hard
And drown me in love
So come on, get higher, loosen my lips
Faith and desire and the swing of your hips
Just pull me down hard
And drown me in love

I miss the pull of your heart
I taste the sparks on your tongue
I see angels and devils
And God, when you come on
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on

Sing sha la la la
Sing sha la la la la

Ooo Ooo Ooo...
So come on, get higher, loosen my lips
Faith and desire and the swing of your hips
Just pull me down hard
And drown me in love
So come on, get higher, loosen my lips
Faith and desire and the swing of your hips
Just pull me down hard
And drown me, drown me in love

It's all wrong, it's all wrong
It's all wrong, it's so right
So come on, get higher
So come on and get higher
'Cause everything works, love
Everything works in your arms.


----- Matt Nathanson


Love this song.  Heard it on the way back home from Milwaukee today, and had to post it, just because.

He's coming to town this summer!  And yes, I have tickets.  :)

Thursday, May 26, 2011

This does not compute

Twice a year I visit my endocrine specialist for a routine checkup on the various hormone levels she is treating via medications. In advance of those visits, I get some blood work done to give her something to evaluate besides my happy demeanor. :)

Since I'll see her next week, I endured the needle last week. But what with losing 20 pounds since my last visit, and starting up running again as well as playing tennis, I figured "oh, this will be a good-looking blood draw for sure". Oops. :( I just got the results and - cholesterol is up, triglycerides are up. What the...?? It's not supposed to go in opposite directions to weight and fitness improvement! What is that about?

Hope she has some answers for me. Grrr.. maybe I need a retake.

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Skate to where the puck will be

Sitting and listening to the featured speaker at J1's graduation, I was prepared to not learn anything of consequence, and didn't, really.
But, something she said did stick with me. This seasoned executive was reviewing her own experiences since grad school and found that most of what she went through in terms of career development specifically (and her life experiences generally) were not things she could have foreseen while in grad school. She tried to alert the newly minted Masters and Doctors that life from here on out will be mostly adaptation, and adapting to the unanticipated, at that.

You face forks in the road all the time, and have to pick one to move forward (that is, unless you're one of those people who doesn't mind pitching your tent at the crossroads and just hanging out there until some person or circumstance comes along and compels you to move). If you want to move forward, you choose an option and go, based on what you know at the time. Later, you may gain more insight and second-guess your choice, but usually you can't get a do-over. Your life direction has moved on, like it or not.

All this I knew, first-hand, from experience. But what she said that stuck with me was a paraphrase of hockey great Wayne Gretzky: the people who are most successful in life (and maybe most at ease with wherever they find themselves), are those who don't skate to where the puck IS. They skate to where it WILL be. They never feel like life has passed them by, because they've been watching it, anticipating what's next. You could use a football analogy just as well. Successful quarterback/wide receiver combos are ones where the QB throws the ball to where he knows the WR will be - they know each other well enough for the QB to throw, before the WR even makes his cut.

It's a great way of visualizing your career progress or your life direction. Of course you have to adapt and adjust to what else is going on around you, to what other people and organizations and cultures are doing, that's part of the game and part of the challenge. Where are you going? Where is the culture around you going? Where are the people you care about going? And will you be in a good place in relation to them 1, 3, 5, 10, 20 years out?

In Seminary right now, and in my recreational reading, I'm focusing on the emerging post-modern culture, the generations stacked up behind me which are coming on fast, and their implications for society and faith. Just because I will hit "retirement age" within the next decade doesn't mean I have to check out. Far from it. I need to be even more discerning because my reflexes will be slowing down, my ability to adapt will become less, and both cultural & technological change will be more difficult to absorb.

So if I am going to successfully and meaningfully connect with the culture around me, and make an impact on people for good... I need to put myself in a position to understand them when we reach that future state together. I need to skate to where the puck WILL be. (even if I don't skate quite as well, or get up as fast after falling as I used to. Hopefully I skate smarter and am not as dependent on speed or agility. The wisdom gained with age is supposed to have benefits!)

That's why I listen to contemporary music as well as other classic forms. It's why I learn the harmonies (2nds, 9ths, suspensions) that underlie current Christian music, so I can continue to be useful on worship team as musical tastes change. It's why, when I have a chance to do an independent study class on Colossians, it takes on a focus of the church and culture, or why an Ecclesiastes class becomes about the ancient author's uncanny ability to relate to today's disillusioned skeptics. And it's why authors like Donald Miller resonate with me, and why I read magazines like Relevant and Good, all so I can sense direction and head that way.

C'mon! Let's skate!





Wednesday, May 18, 2011

That's soooo L.A.

My recent trip to sunny California was ostensibly to sit for hours in a tent stuffed with people getting advanced degrees from USC (one of whom was my very own daughter, lovingly referred to here as J1),


enduring the tedium of commencement speakers and endless lists of names, all for the joy of hearing my kid's name called, and celebrating with her afterward! (Bonus points if you can pick her out of this happy crowd.)

But the graduation itself was sandwiched by touristy stuff on either side, getting the tour with a guide as eclectic as there is at the helm.

LA has fine art (at the Huntington), from famous fops,


to drama queens,


to chicks that would stop conversation when they enter the room.



LA has street art,


street art (of another sort) with flowers,


just plain flowers (USC Rose Garden)


flower-less park-like green spaces (Forest Lawn cemetery),


with outdoor sculptures,


historic eating places,


also with outdoor sculpture (of another sort entirely),


tall iconic art deco buildings (City Hall - where J1 interns and where Law & Order, LA is filmed),


from the top of which you can see other tall buildings,


and from the base of which you can see the building you were just in.


It has ethnic neighborhoods (Little Tokyo),


with ethnic restaurants and food stores.


Speaking of restaurants, we had marvelous food selections, from grill-it-yourself Korean BBQ to Local's gourmet sustainable organics.

The last day there, I wanted to have lunch at a taco truck, since J1 talked about frequenting them. Now I was thinking street vendor, like a falafel cart in Manhattan. Nope. Wilshire Blvd is strictly gourmet. NPR recently ran a story about the gourmet food truck business in L.A. They weren't kidding. There was even a vegan truck. Figures, right?


Me, I went for the Korean Bool Gogi Cheesesteak. Kind of Korean-Philly fusion cooking, I figure. mmmmm...


Last stop was the La Brea Tar Pits (and accompanying museum). Smelly. Oily. Kinda like they took the Gulf Coast oil spill and set it on top of a methane gas fissure. Bubble, bubble, stinky trouble.


The problem with building a museum on an active geological feature like this is that it's, um.. active. The think they have it contained, but... it's inching. closer. all. the. time. :)










But since it is L.A., let me conclude our tour with something no less iconic than La Brea, but decidedly more classy and attractive: Santa Monica.








Right on the ocean, it is Southern California personified. Graceful walks through the park above the beach...


A very cool pedestrian mall (with a dinosaur sculpture covered in jasmine, that looks rather like an armadillo chia pet, spitting.)


Even the street performers have class here. This girl, Chelsea Williams, was terrific. Bought her two CDs because she sounds like a blend of Neko Case and Ingrid Michaelson.


Then of course there's the beach. And such a beach! Deeep, dead flat, clean, and the sand so smooth it looks groomed. Add Palisades Park (yes, THE..) on one end, and you have classic Cali.



And overlooking it all, beatifically, you have Santa Monica her very own self. The patron saint of beach volleyball.

Or something.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

All that celibacy stuff? Oh, never mind.

Yesterday the news broke that yet another mainline denomination has cleared homosexuals to be ordained.  [yawnnn..]  Excuse me, but it's hardly news anymore, right?   This is a path that has been trodden before.  So it's not so much the ordaining of gays to the clergy that's startling about this latest move for a denomination to enlarge its tent, but the way they chose to get there.  To quote from this NPR online article, the route the PCUSA took was "ratifying a proposal that removes the celibacy requirement for unmarried clergy".  That, apparently, was standing in the way of ordaining gays.

Um... wait.  What?


Are they saying that unmarried gays can't possibly be celibate?  I sure hope not.  Or that celibacy would be too much to expect for anyone ordained to the ministry?  Certainly there's a precedent for pastoral celibacy in the Catholic Church, albeit one that has met with mixed success over the centuries.  So what about existing heterosexual pastors who are unmarried?  Are they now also free to, um... fornicate at will?  Yikes!

I must be missing some crucial detail.  Surely such a high calling as the call to the professional ministry, the ordination to the pastorate, comes with an expectation of exemplary behavior and some measure of personal sacrifice.  Is it really too much to ask that an unmarried minister be celibate?  St. Paul suggests in I Cor. 7 that celibacy is a gift; some people have it and some don't.  And if you don't have it... then go ahead and marry, it's no sin.  And for gays, in more and more states (like mine), it's also legal.  In Paul's words, even though celibate singleness is a gift and useful for ministry, it's still "better to marry than to burn with passion".  In the New Testament, then, effective ministry is subservient to personal holiness.  You don't sacrifice morality for the sake of ministry.  The ends don't justify the means.  Ministry must yield. 

So, for those churches who want to be inclusive of gays in the pastorate (the theology of which I'm not debating here), rather than relax the standard for unmarried celibacy, why not instead have a church-sponsored ceremony that serves the purpose of recognizing a committed, monogamous same-sex relationship within the church... even if the state you live in does not do so?  That seems a better route to take; expect (and honor) a committment to life-long monogamy in the pastorate.  Don't lower the standard.

And if you don't aspire to be held to that higher standard... don't aspire to be ordained.  I don't!  There are some gifts I do not have.



(of course, if the government were out of the marriage business, as I've argued before, and Presidential Candidate Ron Paul also suggests, we wouldn't be having this discussion.  The churches would be defining marriage, not the state.)

Sunday, May 08, 2011

Mothers day is always sunny

... or so it seems.

Looking back over the years, I can't remember a Mother's Day that was dark and gloomy.  But I can remember many, many a Mother's Day that was exactly like this one has dawned to be:  cool and bright, with singing birds and blooming flowers.


 Just the kind of day for a Spring coat over a Sunday dress on your way out to church, followed by lunch that someone else prepares.  ;)

Some meteorologist should do a historical study.  I'm thinking that the second Sunday in May is one of the most reliably pleasant days in the calendar.  And why not?  It only seems right.

Wednesday, May 04, 2011

Never again, Lee Greenwood.

There's an old hymn that as a kid I liked to sing; I recall still liking to do so as a young man: The Battle Hymn of the Republic. It was martial, and had a great chorus to it (which I remember being made into a schoolyard jingle, no less. You could do a lot with "Glory, Glory, Hallelujah" if you were creative).

Then Ken Burns came out with his landmark PBS series "The Civil War", and I have refused to sing that song ever since. If it's played at church on some national holiday, I am either silent with bowed head, or I excuse myself and make for the exit. Watching that TV series, I learned for the first time what the song was about, and was appalled at how shamelessly and glibly a hymnwriter could license the support of Almighty God for the Northern Armies to use while Gen. Sherman was burning and killing his way through Georgia. And all this despite President Abraham Lincoln's comments in his second inaugural address regarding the prayers going up from both sides in this war:

"Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. […] The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes."

Well, three days ago I felt the same abhorrence wash over me as I heard a popular song being played in the background while people celebrated in the streets over the death of Osama bin Laden.


This time it was Lee Greenwood's Proud to be an American. I know right now that I'll never sing it again, and will likely excuse myself and leave whenever I hear it played. What a picture: my countrymen and women exulting in joy over a man's death. How much different is this picture than those we've all seen of militants around the world rejoicing over harm done to Americans or our interests (embassies, businesses, airplanes..)?


Change the flags, change the language, add some automatic weapons to fire in the air… the bloodthirsty sentiments are the same: "There, see? We hurt you. We made you pay."


It's the same ugly sentiment you see at sporting events where fans abuse each other and gloat over victories. It's the same ugly partisanship that you see when a political majority rams through some controversial measure. It's the same self-righteous ugliness that you see when a hard-liner of some religious persuasion tells another that they are going to hell because they believe something else.

"We're right. You're wrong. Simple as that."

Nothing is that simple. And no killing is worth celebrating. Lincoln knew it. Most combat vets know it. Those who have lost loved ones to violence usually know that more deaths do not bring back those whom they've lost. Death, no matter to whom, should bring somber pause, not rejoicing. When we rejoice over someone's death, no matter whose death it is, when we show no empathy for our most universal human limitation (mortality), how different are we than those who rejoiced to see Jesus crucifed, and mocked his suffering? What kind of human beings are we to take joy in the suffering and death of another? Seeing justice done is one thing, but celebrating a killing is another thing altogether.

Some people like to think of us as a Christian nation, founded on the Bible. While I think we are many generations past that era, one only has to look at a couple of passages in the Scripture to see what that "biblical" reaction to bin Laden's death would be. (Hint: it's not wrapping yourself in the flag and shouting for joy.)

Ezekiel 33:11
Proverbs 24:17-18
Matthew 5:43-45

I'm grateful to see that there were at least a few voices of restraint emerging after the initial blood-in-the-water feeding frenzy:


http://www.npr.org/2011/05/03/135927693/is-it-wrong-to-celebrate-bin-ladens-death

http://www.relevantmagazine.com/life/current-events/op-ed/25463-should-christians-celebrate-the-death-of-osama-bin-laden

http://www.newevangelicalpartnership.org/?q=node/124

Sunday, May 01, 2011

dandelions


.


happy yellow virus
brightly infecting the lawn
cheerful parasite


.

matt. 6:28-30
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