Sunday, November 28, 2010

robert farrar capon | better watch out


The entire human race is profoundly and desperately religious. From the dim beginnings of our history right up to the present day, there is not a man, woman, or child of us who has ever been immune to the temptation to think that the relationship between God and humanity can be repaired from our side, by our efforts. Whether those efforts involve creedal correctness, cultic performances, or ethical achievements - or whether they amount to little more than crassly superstitious behavior - we are all, at some deep level, committed to them. If we are not convinced that God can be conned into being favorable to us by dint of our doctrinal orthodoxy, or chicken sacrifices, or the gritting of our moral teeth, we still have a hard time shaking the belief that stepping over sidewalk cracks, or hanging up the bath towel so the label won't show, will somehow render the Ruler of the Universe kindhearted, softheaded, or both.

But as the Epistle to the Hebrews pointed out long ago, all such behavior is bunk. The blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sins, nor can any other religious act do what it sets out to do. Either it is ineffective for its purpose, or the supposedly effective intellectual, spiritual, or moral uprightness it counts on to do the job is simply unavailable. . . .

How sad, then, when the church acts as if it is in the religion business rather than in the Gospel-proclaiming business. What a disservice, not only to itself but to a world perpetually sinking in the quagmire of religiosity, when it harps on creed, cult, and conduct as the touchstones of salvation. What a perversion of the truth that sets us free (John 8:32) when it takes the news that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8), and turns it into a proclamation of God as just one more insufferable bookkeeper.

The Messiah whom Jesus' contemporaries expected - and likewise any and all of the messiahs the world has looked to ever since - are like nothing so much as religious versions of "Santa Claus is coming to town." The words of that dreadful Christmas song sum up perfectly the only kind of messianic behavior the human race, in its self-destructive folly, is prepared to accept: "He's making a list; he's checking it twice; he's going to find out who's naughty or nice" - and so on into the dark night of all the tests this naughty world can never pass.

For my money, what Jesus senses clearly and for the first time in the coin in the fish's mouth (Matthew 17:24-27) is that he is not, thank God, Santa Claus. He will come to the world's sins with no lists to check, no tests to grade, no debts to collect, no scores to settle. He will wipe away the handwriting that was against us and nail it to his cross (Colossians 2:14). He will save, not some miniscule coterie of good little boys and girls with religious money in their piggy banks, but all the stone-broke,deadbeat, overextended children of this world whom he, as the Son of man - the Holy Child of God, the Ultimate Big Kid, if you please - will set free in the liberation of his death.

Robert Farrar Capon,
Kingdom, Grace Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus

Saturday, November 27, 2010

stillwell | woodcuts









These images were created by Andrew Stillwell,
a Durham NC artist who uses a Photoshop process of "cutting" out of a black background
to create a woodcut effect.
He works from scratch, not from photographs.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

zachary kanin | noah's ark






selected panels from 

Amazing Tales Of The Bible: Noah's Ark
by Zachary Kanin
The New Yorker, November 1, 2010

Sunday, November 07, 2010

beckett, blake | literary tattoos

Waiting For Godot | Samuel Beckett

Auguries of Innocence | William Blake

Two of fifteen literary tattoos

Tuesday, November 02, 2010

jeanne murray walker | staying power


STAYING POWER
In appreciation of Maxim Gorky at the International
Convention of Atheists. 1929

Like Gorky, I sometimes follow my doubts
outside and question the metal sky,
longing to have the fight settled, thinking
I can't go on like this, and finally I say

all right, it is improbable, all right, there
is no God. And then as if I'm focusing
a magnifying glass on dry leaves, God blazes up.
It's the attention, maybe, to what isn't

there that makes the notion flare like
a forest fire until I have to spend the afternoon
dragging the hose to put it out. Even
on an ordinary day when a friend calls,

tells me they've found melanoma,
complains that the hospital is cold, I say God.
God, I say as my heart turns inside out.
Pick up any language by the scruff of its neck,

wipe its face, set it down on the lawn,
and I bet it will toddle right into the godfire
again, which - though they say it doesn't
exist - can send you straight to the burn unit.

Oh, we have only so many words to think with.
Say God's not fire, say anything, say God's
a phone, maybe. You know you didn't order a phone,
but there it is. It rings. You don't know who it could be.

You don't want to talk, so you pull out
the plug. It rings. You smash it with a hammer
till it bleeds springs and coils and clobbered up
metal bits. It rings again. You pick it up

and a voice you love whispers hello.


by Jeanne Murray Walker
Originally published in Poetry