In April by Rainer Maria Rilke

Apr3

“Poets help us by discovering and uncovering the world-its history, culture, arifacts, and ecology, as well as our identities and relationships.” ~Wallace Stevens

Again the woods are odorous, the lark
Lifts on upsoaring wings the heaven gray
That hung above the tree-tops, veiled and dark,
Where branches bare disclosed the empty day.

After long rainy afternoons an hour
Comes with its shafts of golden light and flings
Them at the windows in a radiant shower,
And rain drops beat the panes like timorous wings.

Then all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep
By the soft sound of rain that slowly dies;
And cradled in the branches, hidden deep
In each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies.

FROM AN APRIL
by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Austrian poet and writer, from a new translation of his poems by Edward Snow

Again the woods smell sweet.
The soaring larks lift up with them
the sky, which weighed so heavily on our shoulders;
through bare branches one still saw the day standing empty â€”
but after long rain-filled afternoons
come the golden sun-drenched
newer hours,
before which, on distant housefronts,
all the wounded
windows flee fearful with beating wings.

Then it goes still. Even the rain runs softer
over the stonesâ€™ quietly darkening glow.
All noises slip entirely away
into the brushwoodâ€™s glimmering buds.

Poems are notoriously difficult to translate. Poetry depends so much on the sound and meaning of a particular language, in this case German. I don’t speak or read German, so I can’t read Rilke’s poems in their original form. I like pieces of each of these translations: “The woods smell sweet” is better than “odorous”. However, I like the shafts of light flinging themselves at the windows and the raindrops beating the “panes like timorous wings.” “The rain runs softer”, but “the stones are crooned to sleep.” “And cradled in the branches, hidden deep in each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies.”

Beautiful imagery, but I can’t help but think I might be better able to capture the essence of the poem if I could read German.

Reading T.S. Eliot

Apr2

For twenty years Iâ€™ve stared my level best
To see if eveningâ€”any eveningâ€”would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasnâ€™t able . . .
~C.S. Lewis

I learned from a friend in college many years ago that you don’t read Eliot and other twentieth century poets the same way you read Tennyson or even The Odyssey. When I I first read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock or The Wasteland, I wanted the poems to tell a straightforward story, a narrative. Prufrock does sort of tell the story of a man who is trapped by his own ineffectualness and lack of confidence. But that poem and especially the other famous poems by Eliot, The Wasteland, Ash Wednesday, The Hollow Men, and Four Quartets all have to be read the same way I have to listen to contemporary song lyrics: pick out the lines and images that speak to you and don’t try too hard to make sense of the whole.

So, my favorite lines from T.S. Eliot:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
~The Hollow Men

Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
~Ash Wednesday

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agÃ¨d eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?
Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessÃ¨d face
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice.
~Ash Wednesday

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
~Four Quartets

Forgive us, O Lord, we acknowledge ourselves as type of the common man,
Of the men and women who shut the door and sit by the fire;
Who fear the blessing of God, the loneliness of the night of God, the surrender required, the deprivation inflicted;
Who fear the injustice of men less than the justice of God;
Who fear the hand at the window, the fire in the thatch, the fist in the tavern, the push into the canal,
Less than we fear the love of God.
~Murder in the Cathedral

On the Resurrection

Apr1

I’m still celebrating, still stuck on the resurrection of Jesus because that one event makes every day a celebration.

“A Jewish revolutionary whose leader had been executed by the authorities, and who managed to escape arrest himself, had two options: give up the revolution, or find another leader. We have evidence of people doing both.

Claiming that the original leader was alive again was simply not an option. Unless, of course, he was.” ~Who Was Jesus? by N.T. Wright.

“Let us band together to invent all the miracles and resurrection appearances which we never saw and let us carry the sham even to death! Why not die for nothing? Why dislike torture and whipping inflicted for no good reason? Let us go out to all nations and overthrow their institutions and denounce their gods! And even if we donâ€™t convince anybody, at least we’ll have the satisfaction of drawing down on ourselves the punishment for out own deceit.” ~Eusebius, 263-339 AD

“I went to a psychologist friend and said if 500 people claimed to see Jesus after he died, it was just a hallucination. He said hallucinations are an individual event. If 500 people have the same hallucination, that’s a bigger miracle than the resurrection.” ~Lee Strobel.

“The Gospels do not explain the Resurrection; the Resurrection explains the Gospels. Belief in the Resurrection is not an appendage to the Christian faith; it is the Christian faith.” ~John S. Whale

'Resurrection!' photo (c) 2010, chicagogeek - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

â€œIf Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.â€ ~The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Timothy Keller

Like Him

Mar31

I thought Iâ€™d post a few times today and tomorrow about the death, burial, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ and what it means to me and to some of the authors and fictional and actual characters that I have on my bookshelves. Iâ€™m going to take turns blogging and house-cleaning and see how that goes.

Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. I John 3:2

If Easter Eggs Would Hatch by Douglas Malloch

I wish that Easter eggs would do
Like eggs of other seasons;
I wish that they hatched something too.
For—well, for lots of reasons.
The eggs you get the usual way
Are always brown and white ones
The eggs you find on Easter Day
Are always gay and bright ones.

I’d love to see a purple hen,
A rooster like a bluebird,
For that would make an old bird then
Look really like a new bird.
If Easter eggs hatched like the rest,
The robin and the swallow
Would peek inside a chicken’s nest
To see what styles to follow.

The rooster now is pretty proud,
But wouldn’t he be merry
If roosters only were allowed
To dress like some canary!
And wouldn’t it be fun to catch
A little silver bunny!
If Easter eggs would only hatch,
My, wouldn’t that be funny!

Not to project too fine a point onto a simple imaginative poem, but how do we know what we might become when we are someday “hatched” into new resurrected bodies? We will be like Him, and we will be the continuing and eternal creation of a very creative God.

My, won’t that be funny!

Eucatastrophic Resurrection

Mar31

I was thinking about the resurrection of Jesus on the way home from church this morning, this being Easter Sunday and all. I’m going to try to reconstruct my thoughts here in this post, but we’ll see how successful I am.

You know when you’re reading a story, especially a thriller or a mystery and there’s a lovely little (or big) twist at the end that is completely unexpected? It’s not where you thought the story was headed, not how you thought it would end, but it works. The ending or surprising climactic scene is something you never would have predicted, and at the same time it’s just what the story needed to tie or untie all the plot knots and make everything feel right. The story, factually and in mood and quality, succeeds.

Well, Jesus’s resurrection is sort of like that unforeseen but perfect ending. If I were the Author (thank God I’m not) of the story of creation, sin and redemption, I wouldn’t have been able to dream up the resurrection, not in a million years. My story, if I had been creative enough to write one at all, would have ended with the crucifixion. Jesus, a good man, lived and taught and died—an innocent sacrifice to the cruelty and blindness of both the Romans and the Jews. It’s a sad story, a tragedy, but perhaps one with a moral to it: we humans are hopelessly lost, and we have a tendency to kill those who tell the truth and demonstrate radical love and self-sacrifice.

Maybe we’ll do better next time, having learned the lesson of Jesus. Probably not.

Jesus is dead at the end of my story. He’s really, truly dead, by the way; this isn’t the sort of story where the hero was only mostly dead but turns out to be revivable. A Roman spear was thrust into his side. His body is sealed in a tomb with a big rock across the entrance, a seal of some kind over the rock, and Roman guards posted outside so that no one can steal the body and pretend to resuscitate it. Jesus’s followers are scattered, demoralized, and discouraged.

And then—the surprise hits me in the face, if I haven’t become inured to the shock from having heard the story so many times. On Sunday some women go to visit Jesus’s tomb, and they meet an angel who tells them that Jesus is not dead. He’s alive!

Whoa, whoa, whoa—wait! You mean the story is that he didn’t really die; he just got badly injured, but he was able to recover and make his way out of the tomb. Or he was a magician with a magic protection coat that made spears and nails seem to pierce him but not really hurt him at all. You mean he became a ghost and appeared to people in a spirit form. Or he was just asleep and looked dead.

Nope, Jesus was dead, and now he’s alive again. Resurrected, as Christians term it.

Could you have predicted that the Author of the human story would have inserted himself into history, allowed himself to suffer and to be killed at the hands of his own creatures, and then . . . come alive again? JRR Tolkien invented the term “eucastrophe”, meaning “a dire situation which is nevertheless salvaged through some unforeseeable turn of events.” (Wikipedia, Eucatastrophe) A resurrection is a really unforeseeable turn of events.

But, and here’s the kicker, the resurrection makes the story work. Without the resurrection, we have a weak, powerless, probably dead god who maybe had good intentions? Without the resurrection of Jesus there is no resurrection, no life after death, for any of us either. Paul said in I Corinthians 5:17, “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” If Jesus is not alive, we have no hope of knowing God or having friendship with Him or making any kind of connection. He’s either dead or so distant that we can never get there from here. Without the resurrection, the whole story of human history, including the story of that “good man” Jesus, is essentially meaningless.

When I say story, I mean a True Story. If we are real, actual entities living in a real, fallen world full of real evil, we need a Real, Resurrected Savior who physically not only died but rose from the dead to reign over all things eternally.

And lo and behold, eucatastrophe!(I like that word), in a three-day turn of events I could never have scripted or invented or predicted, Jesus not only died and was buried, but he also rose from the dead and lives eternally. “Therefore he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them.” (Hebrews 7:25)

We serve a living, creative God of eucatastrophic artistry and imagination. And we have a Risen Savior because of the story-making ability and sacrifice of that same God.

Hallelujah! Eucatastrophe! (Thanks, Tolkien, and with some intellectual indebtedness to my pastor’s sermon this morning.)

Edith Schaeffer, 1914-2013

Mar30

Edith Schaeffer, wife of theologian and Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer, and an author and teacher in her own right, died today and went to be with the Lord.

I knew her through her books, some of which were and are my favorites. I’ve read and enjoyed the ones in boldface.

1969. Lâ€™Abri.
1971. The Hidden Art of Homemaking: Creative Ideas for Enriching Everyday Life.
1973. Everybody Can Know.
1978. Affliction.
1975. Christianity is Jewish.
1975. What is a Family?
1977. A Way of Seeing.
1981. The Tapestry: the life and times of Francis and Edith Schaeffer.
1983. Common Sense Christian Living.
1983. Lifelines: Godâ€™s Framework for Christian Living.
1986. Forever Music.
1988. With Love, Edith: the Lâ€™Abri family letters 1948-1960.
1989. Dear Family: the Lâ€™Abri family letters 1961-1986.
1992. The Life of Prayer.
1994. A Celebration of Marriage: Hopes and Realities.
1994. 10 Things Parents Must Teach Their Children (And Learn for Themselves)
1998. Mei Fuh: Memories from China.
2000. A Celebration of Children.

I need to look for the rest of these books.

“God does not promise to treat each of his children the same in this life. God does not say that each one of his children will have the same pattern of living or follow the same plan. God is a God of diversity. God can make trees—but among the trees are hundreds of kinds of trees. God can make apples trees, but among the apples on that tree no two look identically alike. God is able to make snowflakes, and make each snowflake differently. God has a different plan for each of his children—but it all fits together.” Everybody Can Know: Family Devotions from the Gospel of Luke by Francis and Edith Schaeffer

“Don’t be fearful about the journey ahead; don’t worry where you are going or how you are going to get there. If you believe in the first person of the Trinity, God the Father, also believe in the Second Person of the Trinity, the One who came as the Light of the World, not only to die for people, but to light the way… This one, Jesus Christ, is Himself the Light and will guide your footsteps along the way.” ~Edith Schaeffer

Tim Challies on the life and influence of Edith Schaeffer.
Frank Schaeffer: Good-bye, Mom.
Brenda at Coffee, Tea, Books and Me eulogizes Mrs. Schaeffer.

Saturday

Mar30

“Holy Saturday is the ‘no manâ€™s land’ between death and Resurrection, but One has entered into this ‘no manâ€™s land.'”

“Christ strode through the gate of our final loneliness; in his Passion he went down into the abyss of our abandonment. Where no voice can reach us any longer, there is he. Hell is thereby overcome, or, to be more accurate, death, which was previously hell, is hell no longer. Neither is the same any longer because there is life in the midst of death, because love dwells in it.”

“I find myself before the last leg of my lifeâ€™s journey, and I donâ€™t know what awaits me. I know, however, that the light of God is here, that He is risen, that his light is stronger than every darkness; that the goodness of God is stronger than every evil in this world.”

The above quotes are from Pope Benedict XVI, the now-retired primate of the Catholic Church.

“But Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Saviour on the same day rose from the dead. For He was crucified on the day before that of Saturn (Saturday); and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun, having appeared to His apostles and disciples . . . ” ~Justin Martyr, 150 AD.

So today is the “day of Saturn”, no-man’s land, Holy Saturday, Sabbatum Sanctum, the time between times. And I sometimes find myself living in that between time, that no-man’s land. I know and believe in the resurrection, but there are things in my life and especially in the life of my family that are shrouded in darkness. I live in hope, knowing that the resurrection of Christ is true and trustworthy, but I also live in the reality of a dark Saturday in which my hopes have not yet been realized in many ways.

Yes, it IS finished. He has done it. Life conquered Death. “For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit.” (I Peter 3:18-19)

But wait and watch with me for a little while on this Holy Saturday as I pray for those I love who have not yet experienced the loving power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Some of those I love are still dead and in the tomb of their own sin, and although I believe in a resurrection for them, too, it hasn’t happened yet.

It’s still Saturday. And Jesus is here.

The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer

Mar30

“With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last. The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, saw how he died, he said, “Surely this man was the Son of God!” Mark 15:37-39.

“Self is the opaque veil that hides the Face of God from us. It can be removed only in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction. As well try to instruct leprosy out of our system. There must be a work of God in destruction before we are free. We must invite the cross to do its deadly work within us. We must bring our self-sins to the cross for judgment. We must prepare ourselves for an ordeal of suffering in some measure like that through which our Saviour passed when He suffered under Pontius Pilate.

Let us remember: when we talk of the rending of the veil we are speaking in a figure, and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant; but in actuality there is nothing pleasant about it. In human experience that veil is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient, quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us and make us bleed. To say otherwise is to make the cross no cross and death no death at all. It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply painful. Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus and it is what the cross would do to every man to set him free.

Let us beware of tinkering with our inner life in hope ourselves to rend the veil. God must do everything for us. Our part is to yield and trust. We must confess, forsake, repudiate the self-life, and then reckon it crucified.”

Aiden Wilson Tozer was born April 21, 1897 to a farming family in Pennsylvania. As a teenager, “while on his way home from work at a tire company, he overheard a street preacher say: ‘If you don’t know how to be saved… just call on God.’ Upon returning home, he climbed into the attic and heeded the preacherâ€™s advice.”

He later became a Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor and teacher and still later in his life he edited the denomination’s magazine, Alliance Life. He had seven children, never owned a car, and signed away most of the royalties from his books to charity.

Saturday Review of Books March 30, 2013

Mar29

â€œMost books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.â€ ~J. Swartz

Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Hereâ€™s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesnâ€™t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.

Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where youâ€™ve written your book review. Donâ€™t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after youâ€™ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book youâ€™re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews theyâ€™re most interested in reading.

After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.

1. Amy @ Hope Is the Word (books reviewed in March)
2. Amy @ Hope Is the Word (The Brave Little Toaster)
3. SuziQOregon @ Whimpulsive
4. SuziQOregon @ Whimpulsive (Little House on the Prairie)
5. Reading to Know (The Cats of Tanglewood Forest)
6. Becky (Phoebe Deane)
7. Reading to Know (Emily of Deep Valley)
8. Becky (Orleans)
9. Becky (Rogue’s Princess)
10. Becky (Rogue’s Princess)
11. Becky (Grave Mercy)
12. Becky (Dark Triumph)
13. Becky (Clementine and The Spring Trip)
14. Becky (Understood Betsy)
15. Susan @ Reading World (Beautiful Ruins)
16. Barbara H. (Betsy-Tacy and Betsy-Tacy and Tib)

17. Susan @ Reading World (Shadow on the Crown)
18. Thoughts of Joy (The Fault in Our Stars)
19. Glynn (Standing in Another Man’s Grave)
20. Glynn (Life After Art)
21. Seth@Collateral Bloggage (Ender’s Shadow)
22. Seth@Collateral Bloggage (Out of This World)
23. Beth@Weavings (Coot Club)
24. Helene (Trees, Shrubs and Cacti or How to use your Bible)
25. Hope (A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy)
26. Hope (March Book Report)
27. Lazygal (Maid of Secrets)
28. Lazygal (& Sons)
29. Lazygal (Absent)
30. Lazygal (The Girls of Atomic City)
31. Lazygal (The Ashford Affair)
32. Mental multivitamin (Reading life review)

33. Annie Kate (A New Home for Lily)
34. Annie Kate (This was John Calvin)
35. Beckie @ ByTheBook (Blood Ransom)
36. Beckie @ ByTheBook (So Shines The Night)
37. Lisa Spence (When People are Big and God is Small)
38. S. Krishna (The Fate of Mercy Alban)
39. S. Krishna (The Bellwether Revivals)
40. S. Krishna (The List)
41. S. Krishna (The Taste of Salt)
42. S. Krishna (Dark Tide)
43. S. Krishna (The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook)
44. a barmy bookworm (The Trial)
45. Beckie @ ByTheBook (Woman’s Guide to Reading The Bible in A Year)
46. Benjie @ Book ’em Benj-O (Theodore Boone #3: The Accused)
47. Anna @ Diary of an Eccentric (Every Man Dies Alone)
48. The Girl @ Diary of an Eccentric (Lockdown)

Atoning Sacrifice

Mar29

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: ‘Ye were bought at a price’, and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God. ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship.

He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world. I John 2:2.

I certainly can’t say anything more profound or meaningful than Dietrich Bonhoeffer has already said or put the gospel into words more succinct and pointed than than those John wrote in his first letter in Scripture. And I can’t sing like Chris Tomlin or Matt Redman.

But I can say with millions of saints who have gone before me that Jesus is my atoning sacrifice. I am called to follow Him, and it has cost me everything. Mostly it has cost me my pride and my self-satisfaction. I am bought with a price and I no longer belong to myself. Praise God! He takes my pitiful and sinful self, and He makes me into His adopted daughter. My sinful self is nailed to the cross with Jesus, and I am a new creature in Him.

No other religion or philosophy or god can claim the regenerative power that Jesus claims in the cross and the resurrection because no other religion or philosophy or god has paid the price that Jesus paid. What can your religion do for you except tell you to be good, sacrifice for your own sins, try harder, be better? What can your philosophy do besides exhort you to enjoy life while you can or stoically face suffering because you have no choice? What can your god do for you except provide an illusory and impermanent pleasure or distraction from the very real evil and suffering in this world?

Instead of all these things, Jesus tells me to follow Him and trust Him. I don’t have to try harder to be good or enjoy life or search for pleasure or even ignore suffering. I can rest in His atoning sacrifice and know that “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all–how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32)

Hallelujah! What a Savior!