Saturday Good Reads: A Father's Speech

Of all the things I read and saw online this week, nothing quite affected me like this video of a father giving his daughter away at her wedding. It is simple and straightforward, like, I suspect, the man who made it. It’s heartfelt and funny, but underscored with a serious love. Be prepared to shed a tear (along with the groom).

“A pilgrim of the future”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881 – 1955) isn’t as well known today as he was 50 years ago. He was a Jesuit scholar, paleontologist, theologian, philosopher, writer, speaker, and archaeologist.  He helped identify and authenticate the fossil that became known as “Peking Man.” He wrote several works, some of which had to wait until after his death for publication – the Vatican always sensed a touch of heresy about his theology, at least while he was alive (and not entirely without reason).

He described himself as “a pilgrim of the future on my way back from a journey made entirely in the past,” and the description is an apt one. His writings challenged the Catholic Church on evolution, among other things, and suggested a kind of pantheism. And yet he was true to the church to the very end of his life, always obedient to his superiors.

In Pierre Tielhard de Chardin and the Cosmic Christ, author Alex Terego has provided a short and concise biography of the man and a summary of his thinking and philosophy. Teilhard de Chardin, Terego says, envisioned the “the whole world as the extension of God,” and his understanding of Jesus as “the Incarnate Being in the world of matter stayed with him his whole life.”

Yes, there were some of what we would understand as pantheistic leanings; Teilhard de Chardin was fusing what he had learned through science and philosophy with Catholic theology. He was concerned that the Church was being superseded by discoveries in science, and he understood those discoveries to be expressions of God. Most importantly, he didn’t see contradictions between faith and science, instead understanding a kind of convergence by both.

He had an important influence on many people, three of whom were the man who became Pope Benedict XVI, who recently resigned the papacy; Rowan Williams, the immediate past Archbishop of Canterbury; and the writer Flannery O’Connor. (In fact, it was in O’Connor’s letters that I first discovered Teilhard de Chardin.)

This is not an exhaustive biography, but it wasn’t meant to be, consisting of some 60 pages. Instead, it is an introduction to the man’s life and thought. Terego has done a real service in explaining his subject’s philosophy and theology – it’s not that simple to follow in the original writings.

The Risk of Following

I’m in the bookstore at Laity Lodge, near Kerrville, Texas. I’m here for a retreat, with a cross-discipline group of people who have come together to talk about work, faith, leadership, mental health, art, music, and digital media. An eclectic mix, to be sure, but there is a common thread: we share the thread of faith and a desire to live it in the world.

The bookstore is small, a quiet place. There are some fiction and poetry on the shelves – which my eye seeks first – but most of the books are about faith, devotions, prayer, theology and philosophy – matched to the themes that the lodge and the rugged Texas Hill Country inspire. You see names like C.S. Lewis, Eugene Peterson, Frederick Buechner, Madeleine L’Engle.

And the poet Luci Shaw. I pull a slim volume with her name on it from the shelf; I’ve read her poetry, and enjoyed it, but this isn’t about poetry. The title is The Crime of Living Cautiously: Hearing God’s Call to Adventure. At first I think it’s about leadership, but it turns out to be about how to live a life of faith.

Indirectly, though, it is about leading and following – following Christ and following the leading of Christ. Shaw uses the prism of her own outdoor adventures to examine why she considers living cautiously a crime. And her experiences include bungee jumping, a rowing expedition, a week’s sailing with a woman friend. She enjoys adventures with excitement and a thrill of fear and risk.

Without explicitly saying so, Shaw seems to say we tend to follow Jesus in a rather safe, orderly and secure way, but that we should be following him in order to dare, to risk, in order to truly live. Her physical risks stand as a kind of statement of faith and exhilarating test of self.

Physical outdoor risk (like bungee jumping) are less important to me; here at Laity Lodge, the closest I will get to risk are a hike (mostly upward) and the two scorpion traps in my guest room (for the record, I never see a scorpion on this visit; I’ve seen them before, however).

But I understand what Shaw says; my own sense of exhilaration comes (tinged with risk and fear) have come from taking career risks – risking everything to do something new, something important, something that changes the status quo, something that leaves people (especially me) never the same again.

I’ve taken career risks in two large areas. One is writing a series of corporate speeches that branded me inside the company as a “radical” but which permanently changed the company and the industry. The second is the area that I represent at this retreat – digital media. Interestingly enough, I’m not here to represent what I do at The High Calling (part of the same organization as Laity Lodge); I’m here because of what I do at work, and what I’ve done.

I look back and some of these career risks and smile, but I remind myself that, in their time and context, they threatened and upended the status quo, and there was always opposition, sometimes rather ferocious. An email newsletter for employees (it sound quaint in 2013 but in 1993 it was a revolution that I fought people for months to do and then realized I could do it without permission). Another battle: a corporate web site (“Waste your money if you want to, the web is like 8-track tapes. The future is Lotus Notes”). Then blogs. And then social media.

Did I succeed every time? Yes. And no. Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, a cost was paid. When people have a vested interest in the status quo, they don’t take change lightly.

But this is what happens trying to live a life of faith. Jesus is not status quo; what was status quo was sin, and he came to upend it as only he could do. To follow him, as Shaw explains in her book, is to live a life of risk, daring and adventure.

I buy The Crime of Living Cautiously. It turns out to be well-paired with another book I’m reading, David Platt’s Follow Me. It also turns out that Shaw wrote a considerable portion of the book right here at Laity Lodge.

Follow him and change the human heart, starting with your own. And then change the world.

Over at Faith Barista, Bonnie Gray is writing about “follow.” To see her post and those of others, please visit her site.

Brennan Manning: Boldness

When you read the Book of Acts in the Bible, and especially chapters 13 on (Paul’s missionary journeys), you find a distinct narrative pattern, with a new relatively minor variations.

Paul and his companions enter a city, go to a synagogue, and are invited to speak, a common practice for visiting Jews, They preach the gospel, explaining how Jesus is the long-awaited Messiah. A number of people believe, everybody talks about their message, and the Jews in the synagogue get upset, disinviting Paul and his people. Paul preaches and teaches elsewhere; the Jews (or the silversmiths in Ephesus) raise a ruckus, and eventually Paul and his companions are driven out, and sometimes stoned and beaten.

The narrative is largely repeated everywhere Paul goes. There are at least two interesting observations from this repetition.

First, it’s clear that the gospel message drives people to extremes – they embrace it, or they want to kill the messenger (and sometimes try).

Second, Paul himself knows what will happen. He becomes as familiar with the pattern while living it as we are by reading it. Preach. Some believe. Others get upset. Bad things follow. On to the next town.

This would have to become discouraging after the first few times. And yet, something else happens each time, no matter how bad the previous experience was.

Paul speaks with boldness.

It doesn’t matter if it’s the synagogue rulers at Pisidian Antioch, or the philosophers in Athens, or Roman officials in Corinth, Ephesus and Jerusalem.

Paul speaks with boldness. Always.

We know Paul suffered. He recounts how many times he was beaten, imprisoned, stoned, lashed, assaulted and otherwise persecuted. We know he suffered with a “thorn,” even if the New Testament is not explicit as to what it actually was. And he was human – we know he must have experienced discouragement, despair, doubt, and possibly even depression.

But when it mattered, he spoke boldly. He could argue and debate with the best of them. He was educated, born a Roman citizen when it still counted for something, and had studied under Gamaliel in Jerusalem.

Boldness, Brennan Manning suggests in The Furious Longing of God, is one of the characteristics of a disciple. Be bold, he says. Boldly ask. You don’t need a cohort of sympathizers or any other kind of security blanket.

So speak with boldness. And act with boldness.

Be bold.

You’re a disciple.

Led by Jason Stayszsen and Sarah Salter, we’re discussing The Furious Longing of God. To see more posts on this chapter, “Boldness,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

The white stone

Walk on a rocky beach

seek a single stone

a white stone worn

smooth and buffed

by large hands using

the sea to sand and

grind, and shape and

contour, flatten.

The stone bears a name,

my name, the name

I do not know.

This poem is submitted to Open Link Night at dVerse Poets. To see more poems submitted, please visit the site. The links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time today.

Photograph by Sue Rawlings via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

How to Recognize a Poet at Work

A secretary at work once stopped me outside my office. “People are worried about you,” she said

“Me?” I asked. “Why?”

“You’re walking the hallways, mumbling to yourself. People are noticing.”

I stared for a moment, and then I understood.

“I’m writing a speech,” I said. “It’s a restless activity for me. I have to walk and mouth the words as I go. I have to hear them. The words have to sound right.”

She nodded, relieved, if still a little worried.

I was amused, and then I wondered, do people think I’m weird?

In a word, yes.

You can always recognize the poet at work.

Few of them actually wander the hallways, mumbling to themselves. Poets aren’t quirte that odd. Usually.

But you can tell who they are, even if they don’t write or read poetry.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Cartoon by Frits Ahlefeldt via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

I knew it had always been true

I know the date, time, and place almost exactly.

Jan. 26, 1973, about 9 p.m., outside a room in a basement lecture hall at LSU in Baton Rouge.

I didn’t do the proverbial “ask Jesus into my heart as my personal savior.” It didn’t go quite that way. It was a silent prayer, but it went more like this: “I’m running into something here that I don’t understand, a standard that I can’t measure up to or even hope to measure up to. In comparison, everything I’ve known and wanted and desired is trash. I don’t know why you want me, but since you do, you’ve got me.”

I can’t explain this, but very quickly everything became brand new. I was not “madly in love with Jesus.” I had no mountain-top emotional experiences. But it was all brand new, and I was now seeing things with new eyes.

No one talked about worship wars, culture wars, politics, or the new building program. The church I started attending wasn’t a conventional church at all – it was a group of people who met on Sundays in a lecture hall in LSU’s law school.

I was introduced to a small Bible study group that met in a house off-campus on Saturday mornings. At my first meeting with them, the discussion was about the design of the tabernacle for the Hebrews during the 40 years in the wilderness.

I even went on what today would be called a short-term mission trip – a beach outreach during spring break at Destin, Florida. I remember having an hour-long conversation with a tourist from Germany.

I didn’t know it at the time, but those very early days of my new-found belief would shape my faith for the next 40 years – the way I thought about faith, the way I tried to live it, the way I understood it. It was never about institutions, denominations, or buildings. I encountered all of those things and more along the way, but I never confused them with the church or my faith.

Perhaps most significantly, I have never had doubts about Jesus, God, or my faith. I’ve had plenty of times, serious times, of asking “Why,” and not understanding, and getting angry. But I’ve never had a “crisis of faith,” although I know people who have. I’ve never gotten caught up in the evolution-versus-creationism debate.

In a very real sense, I have had the gift of faith. (If there is any of me in the main character of Michael Kent in my two novels, it is precisely this gift of faith.)

Last week, we followed David Platt as he jackhammered some of the concrete of American cultural Christianity. We’ve had some time to clear away the rubble and let the dust settle.

To the extent that it’s possible, in Follow Me: A Call to Die. A Call to Live, Platt has blasted away the “American cultural” part and is reaching to define what’s left – the “Christianity” part. He’s stripping away what we Americans understand about Jesus, and taking us to what looks like a very different place – the place where Jesus is.

What this is about, Platt says, is taking Jesus at his word. It’s not picking or choosing what we’re most comfortable with, but taking him at his word – his whole word.

And when we do that, we become part of a grand story. “So we go as disciples of Jesus who love his Word and trust his truth,” Platt says. “We got not simply as men and women who at some point decided to make Jesus our personal Lord and Savior, but ultimately as men and women who at every point are devoted to proclaiming Jesus as the universal Lord and Savior. We believe him as his disciples; therefore, we obey him and make disciples.”

That small group Bible study I joined right after finding faith? And that first study about the diagram of the tabernacle in the wilderness? What I remember most about it was the study leader showing how the lines intersected.

The lines took the form of a cross.

As soon as I saw it, I knew it was true. I knew it had always been true.

We’re discussing Follow Me over at The High Calling. Laura Boggess is leading the discussion, and various writers are posting each week. Today’s post is by Sheila LaGrand, and she’s covering chapters 4 and 5..

Related:

Here Come the Radicals. Christianity Today has something of a different take on David Platt, Francis Chan and other leading “radical” Christians.

David Platt Wants You to Get Serious about Following Christ. Christianity Today’s interview with Platt last month.

Last week’s discussion on the book at The High Calling.

Top photograph: the classroom in Lockett Hall, LSU, right outside of which I accepted my new faith in 1973.