I'm experimenting with uploading photographs. Sorry for the choice of photo. I really would like to be able to post my photo to my Blogger profile, but they want a URL. I haven't the slightest idea how that is done, of course. Someday JH will show me. Until then, pardon the experimenting.

Memorial Day Weekend.

I remember when my family referred to it as Decoration Day and we actually used to visit the cemetary and decorate the graves. This fell by the wayside about the time my family read an article on cremation. That was a big watershed on the use of cemeteries, I think. My father was buried in LA in a cemetery with many Mexican graves. At Christmas time, the Mexican families bring a picnic dinner to the cemetery and decorate the graves for the holidays, with Christmas trees (some with lights), wreaths, small momentos. The family actually spends hours at the graveside on their own picnic blanket, kids playing, barbecue oven smoking. Why are our dead so routinely abandoned, or cremated and scattered? What happened to Decoration Day? The dead in Christ will still be raised, I believe. How will that work exactly?

Morpheus/Kevin 

Amusing ourselves to death!

Where is the great apostasy? What is the idolatry of our time? How is the Dark Lord keeping us from knowing who we are and serving and glorifying the One True God? How can he keep us from health? How can he divert us from serving each other and helping each other glorify God in Christ, becoming His saints? Where is our ancient foe? Oh, he’s here. He’s successfully gotten us to substitute his agenda for our Father’s. He keeps us busy amusing ourselves … to death!

Jholder knows this. Fr. Neo knows this. I know this. You know this. We know he is so good at tricking us that we forget he is even doing it, lost in the moment. Occasionally, though, we are given moments of clarity and then of horror at what he is doing. We suddenly see the success of his work around us, usually after indulging the Dark Lord willingly and fully. Anakin, as he disappears into the Dark side says, just before he perishes, “My God, What have I done?” Like him, we despair and know our sinfulness; our prison walls reveal themselves briefly. We then try to throw off the portals of his influence on us. We throw out the TV, or frighten our family by making aggressive moves to do so. We attempt to turn back the incessant hungers, yearnings. We try to repair our vision, substitute prayer, cling to the cross. We realize…again…that we seem to be trapped, surrounded by walls of seductive sensations that we have substituted for the real life planned for us and offered to us in Christ.

Who watches too much TV? Reads too many books? Attends to too much “news”? Putters too much in make-work, buffing and cleaning and repairing our prison cell? Who loses hours in meaningless leisure? Pointless work? Valueless diversion? Futile worry? Who isolates himself from those he should serve in Christ? Who wastes his life in amusement? Who accepts an isolated, virtual, sense-bondage life, renouncing a real one?

This morning it is clear. I remember yesterday’s channel flipping in my room, strolling through the mall at Channelside in Tampa looking at the people seeking, chasing amusement, spending money and time on…what? Nothing of value, except by the grace of God. Who has been seduced by the Dark Side. I have. Who has been turned away from life in Christ, accepting a false substitute? I have. Who has abandoned Christ? I have. Who is a servant of the Dark Lord? I am. Who has abandoned the Lord of Light? Who crucifies Christ, again and again and again? I do. God help me. I do. It is no consolation that I am not alone in doing so. It is God’s grace and the light of His love that let me see this. Father forgive me. In your Sabbath light, let me remember you and your sacrifice to save me, showing me the way through this darkness to you.

What is Episode III about?

I went to see Episode III tonight in Tampa on a business trip. It was satisfying in completing and tying up many plot elements and details of the previous movies. Fortunately, JarJar didn’t have any speaking lines. The movie showed, above all else, the fall and spiritual tragedy of Anakin Skywalker (nee Darth Vader). Anakin’s fall is germaine to the discussion on this site (www.frneo.blogspot.com) of Status Anxiety, I believe.

The main struggle of all our lives seems to be to die to self. But it can't be done in the abstract; it is done by surrendering self to God. Anakin couldn’t manage it. When given the opportunity to say the Jedi's equivalent to “Thy will be done”, he demurred. He wanted Anakin's will to be done, instead. So, he turned to the dark side of The Force. And, in doing so, Anakin yielded to and then became evil. In fact, his surrender to evil was prompted through the tempting of the Sith Lord. But, he had to cooperate and surrender to it. His ego and pride and arrogance and blindness to anything that would not allow him to have his way were thus unchecked, and surged into full bloom. The transition complete, Anakin was reborn. He became Darth Vader, with scary black suit and mask to boot.

Now, what does this have to do with Gall and the book he wants everyone to read (see Fr. Neo's blog for this conversation, please)? The angst that Gall expressed there about his struggles to correctly think and be are about the alternatives open to someone who is not open to surrender. It is called "posing", by some. Posing is trying to be someone, anyone, rather than becoming what God created you to be. God’s way, and the way of the "Good" side of The Force, is the way of surrender to a will not your own. The self is not suppressed in this process; it is transcended. Paul’s way of expressing this is “It is no longer I that live, but Christ lives in me”. Wasn’t this Anakin’s struggle?

Yoda had noticed in Anakin as a "youngling" the anger associated with his mother’s death. Anger is about suppressed or subverted power. Anakin was angry because his mother had been taken from him. His powerlessness as a child about this issue was his weakness. He even knew he was conflicted and told Naboo about it. He also defended the Jedi to the Chancellor by saying that the Jedi were selfless, they were about serving others. When the Chancellor tempted him, this drew out his anger and his pride. Now, instead of a struggle with the dark feelings of anger and resentment about his mother, he was able to “express” his anger. This gave him strength and power, claimed the Chancellor. This would make him more powerful than any Jedi, which was a lie. Anakin's struggle had been to keep it in. Anger and resentment needed to be transcended, but not by fighting against it, but by surrendering it to...well, the correct answer is Christ. I don’t know how the Jedi did this without a personal God who offered to take their sin from them and relieve their burdens. But, the reason for surrender is that surrender is self-abnegation. Our will is what keeps us from the fullness of life in Christ. Christ, like the Force, is actually that which created, maintains and sustains us all.

Gall, on Fr. Neo's site, doesn’t want us to get wrapped up in terms and make our conversations about our facility with the terms. But this is about something real, not just specialized words to show facility with. It may seem abstract, but it is not complex. Surrender to Christ (God) is a posture of submission, immediately felt. Symbolically it is kneeling before His altar. But in the self, it is experienced as dropping the struggle of “trying” to be anything, yielding our self to Him and asking him to help us do His will. Like the Jedi, with practice, we can then become selfless, working and living for the benefit of others, because that is His will for us. He created us to do good works. The specifics of how we do that are peculiar to who each of us were made to be, but that is how we get off the struggle merry-go-round. We acknowledge Him and then surrender to His will. Real surrender must be a way of being, not a way of acting. Those who through God’s grace "be" His will have enormous charisma and humility. Most people believe that charisma is about self esteem and self strength and humility is a form of timidity. They seem to be polar opposite characteristics. But people who have both humility and charisma from spiritual maturity look a lot like Jedi: peaceful and alert, ready to serve with courage and full commitment; able to give their lives. To these blessed ones death is not to be feared. If it is God’s will for them, then so be it.

So, anyway, that’s the way it looks from Tampa tonight.

The Pentecost readings from Acts last week are always stimulating to me. When I was a teenager, my brother Mark and I had friends we used to visit to play pinochle or Canasta on their screen porch and laugh and talk. They were brothers, Tom and John Williams. They were both talented and eccentric. Tom, who had a full printing press in the basement of their home, and who had a penchant for impersonation, was particularly entertaining. When we were about 14 or 15, Tom taught me a phrase in Hebrew, which I have never forgotten. The family was Episcopalian, not Jewish, so I'm not sure where he got it. Phonetically it is "Hoy, ruach hacheshaw no shevis," which I'm told means "Behold there is a strong wind blowing", and refers therefore to the strong wind of Pentecost. The experience of the Upper Room is a Cecille B. DeMille (maybe George Lucas) moment. The strong wind, so strong that it summons the townspeople to the place in large numbers, the tongues of fire descending on those gathered, the debouching of the assembled out into the crowd speaking in all the languages of the people present, Peter's sermon and conversaion of 3,000 to the way. All these things are so exciting. The church is born in a burst of breath from God.
Hallelujah!

Revelations on Revelation.

Over on Fr. Neo's white rabbit (www.frneo.blogspot.com) there has been a flurry of brief conversations on end times. It started with Fr. Neo asking about Tim LeHaye's books and what the existence of a "real" end-times says to us about the nature of God. I noted there that I am unsophisticated about pre-,post- and amillenialism, but have a vague sense of expectation of an end to this phase of our eternal life, someday. Although I think attempts to read the present into Daniel and Revelation is an uncertain use of time, I believe that the possibility of judgement and a transition of the age into God's next surprise is an uncertain boundary on my behavior. Living today as if it might be the last focusses the mind wonderfully. It keeps you blogging, at the very least.

I'm reading Camille Paglia's new book Break, Blow, Burn, which is a collection of poems with commentary. Her thoughts on the meaning of Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 were provocative. I believe that the remembered love is Christ in that poem. She prefers to see a doubt about God's reality and an unidentified lover. Where can we talk about this stuff? Maybe on my deck this summer. I'm mulling that venue over.

A Drive through the Plains.
I had the most wonderful drive last week from Denver to Great Bend, KS and back. I left Denver late on Wednesday, so took I-70 to Russell and then turned south to Great Bend.

I-70 is not my favorite drive. It is an engineering solution through the plains. But the openness and expanded horizon that greeted me even on this leg were very welcome. I could breathe.
My business purpose was to visit a prospect in Great Bend. CPI is a large TPA ("Third Party (Pension) Administrator"), with 3000 retirement plans representing 500,000 plan participants. Since my company provides financial advice to pension plan participants, they were a wonderful choice to visit. I arrived the night before my meeting, slept well, and rose early. I paid my bill and, directed by the proprietor, went to Granny's Grill for breakfast. Granny and "Grampy"(, I assume), were the entire staff: Granny the waitress for the fifteen tables and counter and her partner the cook, visible through the window/counter into the kitchen behind the diner's back wall. I ordered coffee, three eggs and four slices of bacon, which, when they came looked like four eggs! I stopped Granny and asked, but she said the extra large country eggs often had double yolks. Wow.

After breakfast, I drove slowly to my appointment. The best part of the drive through town was turning down Broadway. Here were perfectly maintained large old homes with beautiful big trees, flower boxes, and flowered traditional landscaping. The spiarea bushes were in full bloom, the tulips and early spring flowers were still visible, and the fruit trees were flowering. Several homes were for sale, and I was certain that these houses would sell for over $1,500,000 in Denver.

The meeting was brief and productive, and I soon left Great Bend to begin the 6 and a half hour drive back to Denver. Now the fun began. The day was beautiful and clear skied with widely spaced high clouds. This is big sky country. The expanse of horizon and open plains which spread before me along both sides of Ks 96, was bracing. All the way home, I praised God for this beautiful country. The fields alternated between pasture and winter wheat fields, as green as green could possibly be. The spacious views of seemingly hundreds of miles of uninterrupted plains was breathtaking. Try the ride sometime. There is a Bed and Breakfast on the route. I'll post it here if I can find online.

DOUGLAS GROOTHUIS ON THE DA VINCI CODE
reprinted from Colorado Contender, and ezine for apologists.

Dan Brown. _The Da Vinci Code_. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
Dan Brown has a knack for mystery and excitement. That is one reason why this book is a huge bestseller and will soon be made into a movie. Another reason for its success is that Brown's New Age worldview is held by so many Americans. They resonate with his baseless assertions as they are carried along by the adventure that briskly unfolds. However, in terms of literary value, none of the characters are developed in any psychological depth. They are little more than fast-moving cardboard figures spouting mostly nonsense.
This books claims to be an historical novel (although that term is not used), because the first page says, "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." When an author claims that Jesus was married, that his wife was considered a goddess, that the Gospels are mere political creations, and so on, the author owns the burden of proof. But the burden of proof crushes Dan Brown into a pancake. I will list 12 of his claims that are manifestly false. For the details see Ben Witherington, _The Gospel Code_ (InterVarsity Press, 2004). I will not take up the other errors regarding art and architecture, but will stick to claims related to Christianity. This is only a partial list.
* The canonical gospels do not depict an "earthly Jesus."
This is manifestly false. In the most theological of the four Gospels, John, declares "The Word became flesh and lived among us." See the entire first chapter of John.
* The Gnostic documents that mention Jesus emphasize an "earthly Jesus."
Just the opposite is true! They denounce the physical as evil and promote the spiritual. That is the essence of Gnosticism. Those who "know" flee the material realm.
* The Nag Hammadhi texts are scrolls.
No, they are codices (books).
* There were 80 gospels available at the Council of Nicea to choose from for inclusion in the canon.
This is a howler, as the British say. There were at most about two dozen accounts of the life of Christ. Our four canonical gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) were already well established as authoritative in the ancient churches. Moreover, Nicea did not decide the contents of the canon. Rather, it addressed the question of the relation of the Son to the Father. Agreeing with the ancient texts (the canonical Gospels), it affirmed that Jesus was truly God, one substance with the Father. See John 1:1-3, for example.
* Constantine controlled the outcome of Nicea.
This is simply untrue. The bishops decided matters for themselves according to solid hermeneutical and theological principles.
* The Dead Sea Scrolls speak of Jesus.
No scholar believes this. They address matters related to a Jewish sect group, probably the Essenes. They say exactly nothing about Jesus.
* There is a "sacred feminine" concept in Judaism.
By no means is this true. God is neither male nor female. Gender is applicable only to creation; it does not apply to God. No Jew, living in terms of God's covenant, would worship the earth as a goddess. God alone, who created the heavens and the earth, is to be worshipped. See the First of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20).
* The Bible cannot be verified.
This is false. The Bible touches space-time history, which can be investigated rationally. There is no need to take a blind leap into the void. That, in fact, is what Brown wants you to do concerning his "accurate" claims.
* Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
The only support for this comes from the idea that Jewish males at that time had to be married, and that third-century Gnostic documents make the claim. Both ideas are false. Most Jewish males were married, but not all. John the Baptist was not married. There is no internal evidence in the canonical Gospels (all written in the first century) that Jesus was married. In Matthew 19:10-12, Jesus speaks of those who do not marry for the sake of God's Kingdom. He was one of them. The Gnostic documents are third- century fabrications; moreover, even they do not claim Jesus married Mary Magdalene, only that they had a close relationship.
* The true woman-honoring religion encompasses both goddess worship and Gnosticism.
But these two religions contradict each other. Gnostics did not highly honor women. See the last statement in the Gospel of Thomas on that! +[Ed. note: See the note below on the passage in question.] Women are associated with reproduction and the earth. The Gnostics hated both. There is no earth goddess in Gnosticism.
* Nothing in Christianity is original; it merely borrowed from paganism, such as Mythraism.
This is an old charge and often refuted. Mythraism was probably later than the New Testament documents, was limited mostly to soldiers, and in fact is quite different from the claims of Jesus and the Apostles. See Ronald Nash, _God and the Greeks_.
* Sexual desire is viewed as devilish in orthodox Christianity.
In no way is this true. God created sexuality for (a) the marriage relationship in itself and for (b) child bearing. Sex within heterosexual monogamy is good, according to the Bible. See Genesis chapters 1-2.
So much more could be argued against Brown's claims. Suffice it to say that one should not read this book to find any reliable information on the Bible or Church history (or art history, for that matter; but that is another story). Let the reader beware.
[Douglas Groothuis is Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary and the author of _On Jesus_ (Wadsworth). His Web site is at <http://www.gospelcom.net/ivpress/groothuis/doug/>.]
+ The final statement in the Gospel of Thomas reads, "Simon Peter said
+ to
them, 'Make Mary leave us, for females don't deserve life.'"
[Ed. note: For an article on "Gnosticism and the Gnostic Jesus" by Groothuis, see
<http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/cri/cri-jrnl/web/crj0040a.html>.
For a free two part audio message on _The Da Vinci Code_ by New Testament scholar Dr. Craig Blomberg of Denver Seminary, click on the following links. Note that the links will begin streaming or downloading MP3 audio. The first file is around 12MB, while the second is about 13MB. Part one: <http://maclaurin.org/mp3s/craig_blomberg_1.mp3>. Part two: <http://maclaurin.org/mp3s/craig_blomberg_ii.mp3>. If your bandwidth can't handle the files, try Dr. Blomberg's written review of _The Da Vinci Code_, available at <http://www.denverseminary.edu/dj/articles2004/0200/0202.php>.]