We always marry the wrong person

By Stanley Haurwas, as quoted in Tim Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage:

“Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic that assumes marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment, necessary for us to become “whole” and happy. The assumption is that there is someone just right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person. This moral assumption overlooks a crucial aspect to marriage. I t fails to appreciate that we always marry the wrong person.

We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary problem is … learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.”

Dear Wikipedia. I miss you.

A week’s worth of searches, according to my browser history:

SOPA  (obvious reasons)
Avulsion fracture (family member)
Craig Finn (new album. Hold Steady)
Pieter de Hooch (ghost in his painting about a lady drinking?) 
Nada Surf (new album)
Latin pronunciation (does anyone speak it correctly?)
Martin Luther King Jr. Day (birthday? anniversary of death?) 
Janelle Monae (singing with fun. Is she the cool one or the creepy Monaj chick?)
Augustana (I like “Boston…”)
oyster sauce (vegetarian option?)
PowerLab (work research)
Take My Hand Precious Lord (is this song about dying? Need it for a list)
Nicolas Steno (Google doodle!)
Aortic body, vascular resistance, heart transplantation (work research)
List of Hunger Games characters (who is the tall blond dude?)
The Band (apparently I’m supposed to know these guys)
Osteoporosis (family member)

Appropriate humility

"Theology is the study of God and his ways. For all we know, dung beetles may study us and our ways and call it humanology. If so, we would probably be more touched and amused than irritated. One hopes that God feels likewise."

Frederick Beuchner, in Wishful Thinking

Redemptive goodwill for all men

Happy birthday to a man who realized that love is a courageous stand in the face of evil.

And this is what Jesus means, I think, in this very passage when he says, "Love your enemy." And it’s significant that he does not say, "Like your enemy." Like is a sentimental something, an affectionate something. There are a lot of people that I find it difficult to like. I don’t like what they do to me. I don’t like what they say about me and other people. I don’t like their attitudes. I don’t like some of the things they’re doing. I don’t like them. But Jesus says love them. And love is greater than like. Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody, because God loves them. You refuse to do anything that will defeat an individual, because you have agape in your soul. And here you come to the point that you love the individual who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does. This is what Jesus means when he says, "Love your enemy." This is the way to do it. When the opportunity presents itself when you can defeat your enemy, you must not do it.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Quote from ”Loving Your Enemies,” delivered on 17 November 1957 at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. 
Read the entire sermon here.

Shame immunity

You’ve been around here long enough, you will realize I get a kick out of random connections.  On a good day, they are connections that have deep meaning.

Here’s today’s…

I have been reading a book on being a parent of a teenage daughter – “The Curse of the Good Girl.”  It’s been an interesting book – thinking about what I can apply to young people in my life, and thinking through how these ideas of social pressures on girls might have affected my life and decisions.  One of the major themes of the book is that girls are driven by relationships. They value friendship above all, being seen as “nice,” “smart,” “humble.” Death to a girl is taking a risk that might be perceived as conceited or weird.

And then I trip over Richard Beck’s post about liking pink. And his interest in how “weird” that makes him, and how interesting that social perception is.  And then the spiritual connection:

Most people wouldn’t ever cross a social boundary like this (e.g., getting a black and pink iPhone), even at the expense of their own preferences. The shame, the "sticking out" it just too heavy a burden to bear.
But I wonder. If Christians are supposed to be a "peculiar people" we might need to learn to inoculate ourselves against social shaming. We might need to practice, on a regular basis, small acts of social non-conformity. We need to get used to not caring what people think. We need to become immune to shame.

Oh, that’s a touch headwind to lean into.

Religion AND Jesus

I haven’t bothered to watch the video, but there has been a goodly amount of push-back.  Which is awesomest when it comes from the more “alternative” voices of the church.

So…I believe in Religion AND Jesus.  I believe in the Gospel.  I believe in the transformative, knock you on your ass truth of what God has done in Christ.  I believe that I can only know what this following Jesus thing is about when I learn it from people I would never choose out of a catalog when we all gather together as the broken and blessed Body of Christ around the Eucharistic meal.  I believe that I am the problem at least as often as I am the solution. I believe in participating in sacred traditions that have a whole lot more integrity than anything I could come up with myself.  I believe I need someone else to proclaim the forgiveness of sins to me because I cannot create that for myself.  I believe that Jesus is truly present in the breaking of the bread and that where 2 or more are gathered he is there.   That’s religion AND Jesus.  May God make us worthy of it all.

Nadia Bolz Weber

…To the extent that.

Beauty from Sarah today:

Inasmuch.

It’s funny how these old-fashioned words stick around in my head, thanks to all of those years of memorising Bible verses out of the King James. Inasmuch is one of them.
When I feel it all, too much, when I feel like my life is small and my work is small, when I am here in the living of raising tinies and it feels like that long obedience in one direction that Peterson wrote of, an essay test of spirituality and guts and love, for some reason that one word comes to my mind: inasmuch. It’s just the Old English way of saying "to the extent that." Which means nothing, in and of itself, I know, but it’s the start of a verse of the Bible that goes like this:

Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
(Matthew 25:40b)

There are a lot of ignored and overlooked, a lot of "the least of these" in our world. And three small souls and my work might be one of them. It might not look like much to the outside world when there are big things to do, big dreams to dream, a big world to go out into.  But rescue starts somewhere, small things can be done with great love, we’re all being changed by these days and if anything matters, everything matters. I don’t like being inward and so I do fight to keep us tied to the bigger stories going on around us, but sometimes, its good to remind myself that inasmuch as I do for this small tribe, these beautiful souls, my own self even, I’m making space for God, too.

Not all heroes have good hair.

Happy birthday, Severus Snape.

You showed admirable courage under very difficult circumstances.
You recognized beauty and chose to sacrifice for it.
You proved we are not slaves to past poor decisions, even though the consequences may last for a lifetime.

Plus, you had the spiritual gift of sarcasm.

I pay taxes to the state of confusion.

An interesting answer to the question, "What’s it like to understand advanced math?" from Quora.

Posted response:

"You are comfortable with feeling like you have no deep understanding of the problem you are studying. Indeed, when you do have a deep understanding, you have solved the problem and it is time to do something else. This makes the total time you spend in life reveling in your mastery of something quite brief.
One of the main skills of research scientists of any type is knowing how to work comfortably and productively in a state of confusion."

It’s reassuring to know that my confusion means I am solving a problem 

His Coming, Joy-Streaming

Expect and inhabit great things this New Year.

Lord Jesus, in this fateful hour
I place all Heaven with its power
And the sun with its brightness
And the snow with its whiteness
And the fire with all the strength it hath
And the lightning with its rapid wrath
And the winds with their swiftness along their path

And the sea with its deepness
And the rocks with their steepness
And the child in the manger
Sharing our danger

And the man sandal-shod
Revealing our God
And the hill with its cross
To cry grief, pain and loss
And the dark empty tomb
Like a Heavenly womb

Giving birth to a true life
While death howls in strife
And the bread and the wine
Making human divine

And the stars with their singing
And cherubim winging
And Creation’s wild glory
Contained in His story
And the hope of new birth
On this worn stricken earth

And His coming, joy-streaming
Creation redeeming
And the earth with its starkness
All these we place
By God’s Almighty Help and grace
Between ourselves and the powers of darkness.

By Madeleine L’Engle
Based on “The Rune of St. Patrick” and seen in “A Swiftly Tilting Planet”