The lichen stood like crooked hairs,
the light that through the crooked trees
is soft in that coarse fur is trapped
once in the clouds, then twice.

The trees are small and holding hard
the mountain side with crooked roots;
a tortuous road leads up the pitched
and crooked mountain side.

Our mountains have two shades of green:
the easier slopes are lighter, dark
takes the ascents toward the top
and crowns if other clouds do not.

We neared the line where shades exchanged
their green, where clouds immediately
dispense the water they impart;
the grass was crouching wet.

Fog-forests cling to the steep slopes,
there watered by the wandering clouds.
The waters are abundant where
the heavens touch the earth.

A cloud; a cloud with white and grey
and knowing scientifically
its waterness I see that too.
And how it drifts, gets torn and how
the light works on it . . . Which is
the point of mystery, it seems.
A dark and incandescent cloud.
It dims below but I can’t look
at that top brightness very long.
What is that strange relationship
of light and water doing there?

Listening to Albert N(orth?) Martin’s lectures on Pastoral Theology, in the part that is really homiletics, I have come across two references to Aristotle and Cicero on public speaking. He does it because the RBs don’t hold a whole lot with reading the latest books and so read chaps like Dabney and such NOT as if they were historical relics. One of the disadvantages, remarks Martin, we moderns have is our education is cluttered with trivialities that drive out the worthwhile things such as grammar, composition, classical and substantial literature, Latin etc. I’ve heard him at some point lament his lack of training in formal rhetoric too.

So there you have it. I have thought it would be interesting, if not altogether marketable perhaps, to see somebody write a book on preaching that re-wrote Aristotle and Cicero but with the sermon in view.

I haven’t read either with any profit, but shall be working on that deficiency here one of these days. In the meantime it is raining and I’m working on the fact that I don’t know Plato as well as I know the Bible. I think that is another thing we moderns perhaps ought to regret. One of the great advantages of being here and out of the way of the constant flow of books is that you can settle down to the Plato in the absence of a whole lot of other things.

Don’t we believe that Christ could return at any moment?

No, actually, if we don’t believe in the rapture, we don’t. I was surprised when someone pointed that out to me in MN. When I did it on Sunday, it was surprising for them. The touch-and-go part is that I’m not entirely sure what exactly we hold to with regard to events prior to the second coming.

Speaking of which, a brightish chap we have who switched over from a fundamentalist church was reading Sproul to figure out some eschatology and ended up concluding that because Sproul was arguing for no rapture that the learned man did not believe in the second coming. Sorted him out fairly easily.

Well. In other news, I was reading John Murray on the Covenant Theology and after a survey and study he says the covenants are not agreements between two parties, they are one-sided administrations, they are dispensations of God’s grace. Interesting, isn’t it, how things sometimes seem to whirl around?

I’m looking forward to one day being able to read the book written by the chap without whom I may not have become an RB. It is about Covenant Theology without a covenant of works, an RB development. Reformed Baptists, you know, are sometimes accused of being dispensationalists. Why? No paedobaptism. There is a certain discontinuity involved in the conclusion, after all.

It is a curious phenomenon you have when you consider, for example, Gordon Fee. The guy writes all the books we use to teach exegesis and responsible Bible study and yet we disagree rather strongly with him in a few crucial areas. Even Carson, an admired, responsible scholar, has his continuationism which at least from our perspective (RB) is due to his mishandling of Scripture in his interpretation.

We have the same problem at the level of our church with people who agree with all our principles about the law and the Lord’s Day. You should see the look of weariness that crosses pastor’s faces when it come to these subjects because the practice doesn’t correspond to the principles, especially here where no underlying protestant culture exists. And the same is true in the area of worship. The debate isn’t so much about the principles, but about a consistent working out in practice of the basic principles everybody nearly everywhere affirms.

And I think the explanation of this situation is that while it is hard to get to the principles, requiring study and method and such, it is much harder to achieve a consistent implementation of the principles in our lives. Which should make us consider our own practice with the soberness of fear.

While I haven’t been a pastor for very long, it seems to me that this is the difficult but very crucial point to which everything essentially comes. And a good pastor has to be one who is dealing with this first at a personal level and from there helping the congregation. It isn’t simply a matter of principles understood, but of principles so assimilated that they are loved with a love seeking obedience in complete implementation of the spirit that underlies the letter of the principle.

To take it beyond the cliché of head knowledge and heart knowledge with which I think we sometimes diagnose to avoid any useful prognosis*: it is a failure of imagination, which can be a failure simply at the level of imagination but also a failure at the deeper level of desire which seeks the capacities of the imagination in finding solutions. It seems to me this failure gives us the results we live with and with which our principles daily die.

______________
*That it is another cliché cannot be disputed: it might be called a principle that leads to no implementation. However fresh the insight may have been in the past (and it can stand for the heart of the problem if it can be rejuvenated, but that would require a great deal of imagination as the unfortunate division it created has now to be overcome; though I sometimes wonder if a thing does not become a cliché because it was never true enough to begin with), you know it will get a thousand wagging heads today, but how many assenting hearts? It is a thing frequently said, not fervently believed = cliché. Which is why Bauder is right in saying that clichés are the death of spirituality. And also why clichés must not be uttered from the pulpit–a temptation most difficult to overcome, I add in order to drive home the point of the discontinuity between our principles and our practice.

I have been thinking about what I would do if I don’t stay here. There is a good chance, as I am not willing to live on the kind of salary a Colombian pastor would be willing to live on that they’ll reconsider. There are a few factors: for them to visit family it might cost 200k pesos for two, for me to visit family we are looking at 3million pesos for two, with cheap tickets. A Colombian can live in neighborhoods it is not advisable foreigners do, and as a result cheaper. I was talking to a missionary and he asked me if I wasn’t willing to make the sacrifice. I had no trouble saying no. We are quite sure we aren’t willing. Not been called, can see other solution to their situation, what would be the point of sacrificing without a real, compelling motive? We’ve tried it for long enough to be sure. We do not want to keep living here if it means we keep drawing on our savings which after a couple of years and even a stimulus package or two have dwindled.

So what would I do? I joked with Katrina that I’d be a chaplain in the military. Turns out the Navy has something on an online search thing for an opening somehow associated with St. Paul, MN. At this point, shouldn’t I get a job that has to do with what I studied? One of the things that’s been easiest for me here is talking to young men–they’re so ignorant you don’t have to know much to talk to them. The cons are the discipline and leaving the family behind. Can I handle the discipline? And the wife? But then I can just send her to visit all her friends and family when I’m away. Or just do the Air Force and not be away that much?

Another option would be to return to the academy, providing I could get myself into a Ph.D. program. Theology and probably systematic, it would be, though maybe history or historical. I’m really not prepared for higher study of other things, at this point. I was looking at Paul Helm there in London. Wouldn’t that be keen? With the Metropolitan Tabernacle and all. Not sure how one would pay for it, but an interesting possibility. Not sure about programs in the USA. Looked up Beeson to see if old Dr. Bray, who wrote an excellent book I just read, did, but saw they don’t do Ph.D’s. Looked up the Edinburgh, Scotland faculty and found a chap all into phenomenology. Could I stand that? Could I stand the academy? There is such a deadness I always feel in the kind of people you encounter there. You think you’re going to run into Dorothy Sayers and C.S. Lewis and civilized people who drink tea, but what do you get?

Or get a real job and plod on that way, scratching away furtively at the SF–just got two more rejections this week. It keeps improving there, and I just need to persevere, but I think I have to do something while I persevere which needs to be long-term.

One thing is almost certain, I’ll try avoiding returning to teaching basic English very much. And I don’t see other possibilities here.

Or they might decide to pay me more and keep me. That is still on the cards.

For what? For those far lands? People are able to read Tolkien and feel no longing, I suppose. I guess that’s what happens when they read and either don’t make it to the end or don’t return. It doesn’t seem to call them.

But I can’t. It calls me whenever he mentions a tree, or speaks of the seasons, or has someone use the seasons as an ominous metaphor. To mention blades of grass, or birds, with him, is like hearing again the hunting horn of Orome in the ancient forests: it calls me away. And with it there is always the subtle sadness, the sense of something good dwindling, and then the growing of an ominous sense of some awful shadow looming at the threshold of consciousness.

Good is always great and splendid and never without a threat somewhere in Numenor and Middle Earth, the dwelling places of men. You always get a sadness of conflicting will, which I take to describe the human condition. The worst thing about the world after a decisive battle in which a high tide of evil was turned is the subsequent neglect–the ominous neglect in which only one voice urges vigilance in vain. A failure of memory ensues, defeating triumph.

It is a pagan element. A grand, vast, prodigal and prodigious sense not only of joy but of evil teeming under the earth and gathering to emerge rampant. It is as pagan as tragedy, and that calls to us more than any anemic secular calculation. What does it have to do with the longing? It is longing that disturbs ages of peace; longing that makes the wanderer wander wayward; longing which upsets the careful balance; longing in a peaceful blessed existence that will not be satisfied; that upsets the joy of the human condition and yet what attracts us as readers.

What did Tolkien believe about rest? That it could never come unearned? Isn’t it in some way disquieting to face and feel that longing without which there would be no shadow and without which shadow there would be no story? Is it a longing for story? Or the longing of looking into a mirror, and seeing ourselves in our world but not in our world, attracted somehow to the suggestion of something greater, better?

It is a longing for more, quite undefined and at the same time all intense. Have I examined it right? I don’t know, but I do think part of it is the long night of romanticism which strains through deeper darkness for an unimagined day. The map of Arda always comes alive, because in some way it is a map of the mysteries suggested by the vast uncharted regions of the human soul.

What is the main ingredient in a Colombian hot dog?

You might think the meat is, but if you thought that you would be wrong because the main ingredient is the bun. Now in a regular hot dog the bun functions as an eatable napkin. It is there to hold the main part with and has the added value of maintaining the condiments for an evenly distributed eating-experience.

In a Colombian hot dog the bun functions that second way as well. What else would keep the pink sauce on the meat, not to mention whatever else they add: sautéed onions, sugar-based red sauce known as tomato sauce with little of the tomato recognizable therein, the shoe-string fries and of course, the two quails eggs, though these can be attached with toothpicks and perhaps are no part of the services the bun offers. But returning to the bun, unless the thing is large enough–say twice the mass of the actual dog–it might have a circumference lesser than that of your mouth, which would mean you are getting ripped off. Besides, the increased surface area allows for about a regular package of potato-chips-worth of the shoe-string fries to go on top for an evenly distributed eating-experience . . . in which the dog is another condiment for the bun.

It does not make for great table manners, but Colombians in general do things that in other places might not be considered great table manners anyway. Which reminds me they always have their hamburgers in a little box, as they do their hot dogs.

Of course you need a little box, the whole thing is unmanageable otherwise. What else I have learned is that if you order it without the sauces–no sauces? and their eyes go round–it is a lot more agreeable. I don’t know who came down here and made all their sauces abominable, but someone must have. Mine just now–hot dog, that is–was just BUN, hot dog, ham, cheese, the shoe-string fries and, of course, two quail’s eggs. It was a simple version of a hot dog, actually.

Not sure yet why quail’s eggs are such an integral part of fast food here.

within the context of the present:

With their night-vision goggles, pilots could see ghostly green infrared-targeting beams — emanating from the weapons of the soldiers on the ground — crisscross the structure, as well as the spark and twinkle of bullets bouncing off of the cellphone tower’s walls.

-Bill Ardolino, Wired Magazine.

Isn’t it curious, that last part? Interesting. Read it all by itself:

as well as the spark and twinkle of bullets bouncing off of the cellphone tower’s walls.

Not Science Fiction, but it could be since it is both strange and beautiful.

What is it? It strikes me as in some ways a desire for a return to elegance, grace of some sort. But not in the way of going back to the farm and the cattle and simple living. A way through technology. It has to be something aesthetic–at some level. The appeal is in the aesthetic it seems to me, but obviously not exclusively that. What else?

Here is something: I don’t know if it will help everybody, but the idea of Steampunk is there. It strikes me as a clear one, but then, that’s just me.

I don’t know a whole lot about Steampunk, but there is some appeal there. I’m curiouser and curiouser. Can it be that this is part of my love for accordions? And the organ now . . .

I am not a great one for simple things. I do not think it is a gift to be and the idea that you just come down free is one I find fatuous.

But in beginning a thing, it is good to get the simple outlines. It helps one gets one’s bearings, and I can see how some spend their life slowly gathering about themselves their bearings, though it seems an alarming thing in which to persist.

So I have reached Luke 17 and have to touch on Eschatology and even know what I’m saying. I did not realize what was waiting me, but had picked up something simple on Eschatology to start working on, and it was at a good moment. I picked up Lloyd-Jones on The Church and the Last Things (I translate from the Spanish, from which another legitimate if curious translation would be The Church and the Latest Things).

Simple, but sound. And you know what? Sensible. He insists on not simply presenting the correct interpretation but in weighing always two or three on topics such as: when is the Second Coming, is there a future for the Jews, Daniel 9, Romans 11 and such. He insists on it because he wants to take into consideration the variety of backgrounds his people come from, and he is wise to do so.

We are wise to do so, who aren’t dispensationalists. The chances are high that most Christians are and that many know little else. It is also the truth that many Covenant Theologians can’t fairly represent dispensationalism, don’t try, and that is counterproductive. It has to be one of my simple goals to quell the impulse to be anti-dispensationalist, but at least for that I’m pretty well equipped.

I don’t read Lloyd-Jones too much because he is simple, but here I have a useful thing.

Curious, isn’t it, how in the 24th of Genesis the chap asks God for a sign and then when he gets it he sits there wondering if it really is true. When afterward Rebekah tells him her lineage we have one of those pauses in her speech that indicate something of significance has silently taken place. What? The dropping of our hero’s jaw is what.

Well, not so curious that he wonders, after all. We don’t usually believe those things. Take the chap who while waiting for his date asks God that if this is the one she come out in a pink dress with purple shoes and her hair in pig tails. The girl comes out with her hair unbound, a green dress and white shoes and what does lover-boy say? I don’t believe that stuff anyway, and he says it every single time whether it works or not.

Of course! And on the occasions when it works out, do we believe it? No, we say what a coincidence, but we know we can’t rely on that kind of thing because it is extrinsic to the criteria for deciding. We know we have a moral responsibility to reach the decisions before us without evading our responsibility to understand the situation and judge correctly. People routinely pray for God to remove from them the moral responsibility of making their decisions well, but I don’t think they do it according to the will of God.

Arrive, make inquiries, locate the relatives, put it to them–that’s all he has to do. But there is something Abraham did say about God’s messenger going before him, and maybe that’s how our chap thought it should work.

You can say it showed Rebekah was a hard worker. I take a more cynical view of Laban’s sister. If the well is the equivalent of a gas station, to what are ten camels equivalent? A Rolls Royce. I take that view because I remember that when it came to swindling Esau for the second time, it was not exactly Jacob who took the initiative.

Calvin has a problem with what the chap does, praying like that, but he’s awfully dodgy in his comment, isn’t he?

Therefore we must know, that although a special promise had not been made at the moment, yet the servant was not praying rashly, nor according to the lust of the flesh, but by the secret impulse of the Spirit.

We must understand such is the case, Calvin believes, because what other sense can we make out of a pious man praying with such presumption? But what if he isn’t so pious to begin with? And then Calvin explains the part where it doesn’t convince our chap like this:

There is, therefore, no absurdity in supposing that the servant of Abraham, though committing himself generally to the providence of God, yet wavers, and is agitated, amidst a multiplicity of conflicting thoughts. Again, faith, although it pacifies and calms the minds of the pious, so that they patiently wait for God, still does not exonerate them from all care; because it is necessary that patience itself should be exercised, by anxious expectation, until the Lord fulfill what he has promised. But though this hesitation of Abraham’s servant was not free from fault, inasmuch as it flowed from infirmity of faith; it is yet, on this account, excusable, because he did not turn his eyes in another direction, but only sought from the event a confirmation of his faith, that he might perceive God to be present with him.

From the Logos.

Dodgy, Calvin. Moment of exegetical weakness, I’m afraid. The secret impulse is entirely putative. And it didn’t really serve its purposes there, did it? What did it accomplish if it didn’t persuade him? Why suggest it? See: Law of Parsimony.

What if he asked on no secret impulse other than a weak grasp of theology and a general ignorance of the life of faith and was silly to do it? What if an awful lot of what’s going on here isn’t actually normative at all, but simply descriptive?

Yes, God granted the request, but the question is why? No, I don’t think it is because God put in him a secret impulse to make a rash prayer and with presumption tell God how to do his errand rather than trusting that the angel went before him as Abraham believed. And I think the answer is in the use the servant can make of the episode in his persuasion of the family.

Leaves old Laban in a tough position, along with Bethuel: outmaneuvered by the gods, in this case the strangely named god Abraham seems to have picked up. (We are pretty sure Laban is an idolater.) Well, we can’t comment, they reply. Obviously the thing is from YHWH. [Do you think Moses' use of the Tetragrammaton is a deliberate anachronism?]

And I think God did it to persuade Laban and Bethuel, but not our unnamed chap. Obviously the thing is from the Lord: out the girl pops like a jack-in-the-box and says, Hey mister, looking for someone to wash the windshield on that? But what would our chap be missing if he hadn’t prayed that way? Not more security about the decision, because he didn’t get it by doing that. What he would have been missing is the persuasion; and negotiations with Laban, as we later find out, can be tricky.

The angel of the Lord was going ahead and with the old oil to make things smooth for our dubious and not to eager chap, his weaknesses notwithstanding.

You have to love it when they trot out the law of parsimony as if it were a universal principle which must rule all good thinking.

What causes it? What poverty gives rise to this so-called law of thought and explanation thrift? God is not parsimonious in his creation. Is one planet enough for him? One sun? One galaxy? Is the fullness of the sea full with one or two or even a thousand living kinds of creatures? Is he happy with just one species without endlessly proliferating subspecies? Did the God who created Mr. G.K. Chesterton ever once have an idea of parsimony, let alone practice it?

I think not. Is it a poverty of imagination that brings an affinity for the law of parsimony about, I wonder? Oh, yes, I wonder. A fondness of what is meager and cramped, perhaps? For what is reduced and sterile and simple, please, just simple and uncomplicated and requiring no abundant effort, yielding no abundant wonder, and with only a tight-lipped and streamlined satisfaction at the end. Or is it a hoarding that causes this parsimony–a fear there may not be all that much more left in reserve? A sort of crisis of confidence in the economy of ideas, explanations and possibilities? It seems an awful bias toward simplicity, but what in God’s creation makes them think that way? What in the realities of life, the universe and everything demands it first?

What kind of a blighter wants a law of parsimony to begin with? The law of parsimony makes for good machines, but what kind of life? What qualities that are not parsimonious remain when the law of parsimony is not selectively obeyed?

Admittedly, the simple and the obvious explanation is not often the one that first springs to my mind, so when the ‘law’ is trotted out I wonder. I want no economic explanations, no poverty of imagination. I want lavish and luxuriating riches and qualities in quantities of conundrum.

The focus of our educational systems on popular culture, political correctness, and the cult of self-esteem has had two consequences for everyday speech. First, young people prefer to remain silent rather than risk an opinion. Secondly, when they do talk, it is in an outpouring, in the belief that one person’s language is as good as any other’s. Bon mots, aphorisms, insightful quotations, nuggets of wisdom, or even ordinary apt remarks form only a tiny part of their conversation.

A degree in the humanities should have something of the ancient study of rhetoric. It should be equipping students to persuade, to use language gracefully and succinctly, and to speak and write with style. Persuasion comes not through statistics and theories, but through the artful aphorism that summarizes, in the heart of the listeners, the things that they suspect but don’t yet know.

–Roger Scruton

So that’s what you work with when you paint: shapes and colors. Make a mountain steeper and you have something not like the leveler mountains. I think the more steeply pitched the mountains, the more they approach a fairy tale. I made some with shapes that echoed pine trees across the silent landscape.

Isn’t it curious–the system of metaphors?

I was pressing my teacher on this point this morning. How do you know these colors are complimentary? She hadn’t thought about it. She supposed we saw them in nature and said: we like that and don’t like that.

They really believe, around here, that these things are arbitrary human fashions. Had a music student trying to tell me that on Wednesday about sounds and I kept pushing back.

No, I pressed, what do they correspond to? You say this color is warm and this one is cold. This blue gives me no chill, but we all recognize the metaphor of temperature. To what do these things correspond? What underlying reality are we making use of? Why do we say they complement or contrast and what is the idea underneath that that I can get ahold of and use color properly? I can’t accept just telling me this goes with this and this does not anymore than I can learn grammar if you don’t give me the reasons behind the rules.

She started saying subjective and objective. I said, it is beyond that. To what does it correspond, what connects the appearances in nature to the appearance on the paper?

I ended up telling her that I’m not interested in realism (!), imitating things merely: I want to paint ideas. And what I’m stuck on is what makes colors work as a system? What does the juxtaposition of certain colors mean within its own system and why does that system of metaphors work? I’m learning some of the vocabulary for handling it. One useful term today is what happens when you mix secondary colors together: you start getting neutral tones. It makes a lot of sense, the word ‘neutral,’ but why? I think she said we also talk about the chromatic level. Low chromatic level and high chromatic level: high being pure.

I didn’t stop her to say pure what? Pure primary is what I gather, but what truth is there in primary colors? What cleanness of light? She wanted to tell me for a while it was all arbitrary, to which I did not reply: not in God’s world.

Has anybody ever written an aesthetics of color? we ended up asking.

Maybe all rubbish, but a very interesting class just when I needed it!

One of the things that happens is that you find as time goes on that there is an adjustment of your tastes. When you left the USA you thought of Dr. Pepper and Cheezits, you remembered what passes for Chinese food in the USA and pizza, and your life in cars, in sealed buildings, what you could find in the MIA, the public libraries, all those things.

But after a couple of years what one finds is that one even starts to wonder if Dr. Pepper matters all that much. Strange, and almost a point of heresy, but true. I think I will always be able to miss going out and ordering a complete breakfast. I am not talking about the childish stuff all sugar and whipped cream and syrup which I don’t think people can so much enjoy eating as they do because of how it appears. No, not breakfast for the vulgar, I am talking about eggs, bacon, hashbrowns and good sausage, and perhaps some cajun rice, along with english muffins, and coffee.

They don’t do that here, though they do know how to make a scrambled egg very well. Which adds the final point. Where one to leave, one would have to re-experience the whole adjustment of tastes again, with the disconcerting attachment to the former things, and the impatience with ways not yet entirely assimilated.