Entries in Life

Fr Stephen has written out some thoughts on American Christianity and I found this bit especially apropos after reading this post from Bruce Reyes-Chow:

The problem with this marketing approach [using different sorts of music to attract different groups to your church] is only beginning to reveal its flaws (apart from the theology behind it): America is becoming increasingly fragmented in its music styles. Thus Churches, or at least services, are having to be multiplied to meet the growing diversity of the market. … Someone asked me once (actually more than once) what St. Anne (my parish) does to grow. I answered simply: “We answer the phone.” I cannot explain where the converts come from, though there is a slow but steady stream… The faith remains the same whether the “market” is a village in Africa or a suburb of Los Angeles. It is thus truly “inclusive” and “universal” in the extreme.

The comments become pretty interesting. Especially since my church has Sunday School, Vacation Bible School, Stewardship drives, study groups, etc — all things that converts poo-poo in the comments as “too American.”

I’ve been reading Terry Pratchett recently. I suppose you could say this is like reading through John Grisham’s œuvre, but he writes funny, entertaining books that are hard to put down. And he doesn’t divide them into chapters. So I have a hard time stopping. I also discovered that much of Akira Kurosawa’s work in film is in the public domain and available from the Internet Archive. I just finished Ikiru (To Live) and he really got me in the end. Thought he was going for easy, but he didn’t.

After reading a lot about OrgMode, seeing that a lot of former Planner users switch to OrgMode, and with OrgMode now included in Emacs CVS, I decided to give it a try. First things first, though. I created some .deb packages for OrgMode and used LaunchPad’s PPA to build and host it. Happy Thanksgiving, y’all!

It snowed yesterday. The snow is mostly gone now (though the remains of a mini-snowman are still there), but yesterday also brought a nice treat for me: a 24” flatscreen. I had an old 17” CRT, but it was losing focus and I was going crazy trying to use it. The new screen lets me run XP for testing under KVM and still have plenty of real estate left over for real work. I’m in a two foot version of heaven.

One of the great comments I missed was this one from danlyke on Things need to change:

It seems like that “incarnate understanding of poverty” is what most people go out of their way to avoid, and it’s only by treating charity as something we roll up our sleeves and actively do that we not only get the larger good effects, but we get the closer to home notion of what it is we’re actually working towards, and a better understanding of the sort of change in the world necessary to really bring that shift about.

Neil Postman hinted at the problem in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death and the introduction of Longing for God uses this formula (that I’m sure danlyke isn’t going to automatically agree with):

Godly passion has been reduced to lust, just as our thirst for knowledge has degenerated into a need for amusement. Our most passionate quest, in fact, is for entertainment: to be distracted and amused by computer games, Internet pornography, sports events or “must see” TV. [emphasis mine]

This, I think, is the core of the problem: We seek out banal diversions instead of actively engaging our neighors. As Dan says, we “go out of our way” to avoid engaging people when, in fact, working to engage people is exactly what we should be doing… it is going to bring us the most satisfaction than another episode of our favorite TV show. I see my own failure here. I’m certainly not in a position to tell others to do what I haven’t yet accomplished, but I know from past experience how refreshingly authentic an “incarnate understanding of poverty” is. My struggle is to stop being distracted and to start making time to engage those I can help.

For some reason (maybe I was overwhelmed with spam?) I wasn’t getting a copy of comments emailed to me, so I missed some discussion on What difference does IT make? and Things need to change. I’ll should be getting comments in my email now. I’ll also see if I can’t respond to these week(s) old comments. In the meantime, you can check out the rewrite of What difference does IT make? that I posted on the work blog.

Last night, our library showed Ostrov — a popular movie in Russia that did well at Sundance. When I first heard about this movie (I’ve forgotten where, now), I knew I wanted to see it. didn’t know I wanted to see it, but when she saw the description at the library, she knew I would be interested. (Aside: My three oldest children were the only kids there. One of the older ladies asked us afterwards if we were Russian — our children behaved so well through a subtitled film! Little did she know that they always turn on subtitles — even for English language films.) Here’s the synopsis from Amazon:

Somewhere in Northern Russia in a small Russian Orthodox monastery lives a very unusual man. His fellow-monks are confused by his bizarre conduct. Those who visit the island believe that the man has the power to heal, exorcise demons and foretell the future. However, he considers himself unworthy because of a sin he committed in his youth. The film is a parable, combining the realities of Russian everyday life with monastic ritual and routine.

Ostrov is steeped in (Russian) Orthodox monasticism, so well over a third of it is prayers or psalms, but this is what monastics do: they pray. If orthopraxis were simply about living in a way that others could look at and say “Yes, Father Job is a Holy Man” then Father Job would be the center of attention in this film. Instead Father Job, like the prodigal son’s brother, seems jealous of Father Anatoli’s gifts. In the meantime, Father Anatoli, instead of living a blissfully pious life, is wracked with guilt and isn’t a very pleasant person to be around. He’s humble and gifted, to be sure, but he lacks intelligence and people skills. And that last part is precisely what makes the film so attractive to me. When he was asked why he was spending time with sinners, Jesus replied “They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick.” Father Anatoli is clearly not a holy man, but he is blessed, and he blesses others. (I recommend this movie highly. Still, if you see it, read some of the comments on Amazon.com or IMDB. There are some parts where the subtitles are incorrect. For example, near the end of the movie, he asks someone “Will you take a confession?” and the subtitles translate this as “Do you want to go to confession?”)