‘The difference between you and me, Erasmus, is that you sit above Scripture and judge it, while I sit under Scripture and let it judge me!’ Martin Luther
And Luther had the more fruitful, influential and world-changing life
The Peace of Wild Things
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Thomas Merton’s Beautiful Prayer–You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it.
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust You always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for You are ever with me, and You will never leave me to face my perils alone.
Amen
(Thomas Merton)
Do not labour for food which perishes, but for food that endures to eternal life. John 6.27.
| Franz Snyders |
Do not labour for food which perishes, but for food that endures to eternal life.
Not all of us have choices about what labour we undertake. Many of us have our choices cut out for us by long years of training and experience.
But insofar as one does have a choice, here’s a principle for work which Jesus offers.
Do not work merely for money or food, which is spent and gone; work for things that will endure in eternity.
What will endure? Goodness will. Good deeds put into God’s invisible and run-proof bank. Helping other gravitate towards the same.
Doing whatever you do because it is the will of God for your life–that will endure.
As I return to writing after 2.5 years spent setting up house, and establishing a small business, I think I am going to use that as a principle for my work.
To write that which might endure to eternal life.
Thoughts on the Election of President Obama
I was proud of America. I feared that when it came to it, most white people wouldn’t vote for a black person. However, as the New York Times said, the economy was the overriding issue, and so many, no doubt, “swallowed hard” and did the deed.
Brilliant!
Race is a double edged sword. 13 percent of the voters were black, and, probably, would have voted for Obama even if his platform was far-fetched. And, in the final analysis, the people who voted for him because he was black, outweighed those who did not vote for him because he was black.
My friend Paul Miller used to say that 90 percent of wisdom lay in keeping your mouth shut, and saying as little as possible. We see that in Obama. While McCain’s reaction to the collapse of Lehman was to say that the fundamentals of the economy are strong (as except for the over-borrowing, I believe they are) Obama said nothing, and so, in contrast to McCain’s failed attempt to fix the credit crisis, came across as the better choice. His early off the cuff remarks got him into trouble, like saying that most small town Americans are bitter, clinging to guns and religion, and so he confined himself to jingly quotable slogans as the election progressed–like, Yes, we can.
His acceptance speech was brilliant and well-crafted. I have no doubt his inauguration speech will be as good as Kennedy’s.
Seeing black people with tears pouring down their faces as they voted for a black man and watched him win, was the most memorable and emotive moment of the campaign. What a heavy weight of love and expectation for Obama to carry!
Here’s a Presidency worth watching. I wish him well.
Another Bushism
George Bush
‘One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.’ Quoted in US News & World Report, January 2000.
And here is my absolute favourite Bushism.
George Bush’s favourite political philosopher
Asked what “political philosopher” he most admires, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, replied, “Christ, because he changed my heart….When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as the Savior, it changes your heart and changes your life.”
Times – Picayune; New Orleans, La.; Dec 25, 1999
Times – Picayune; New Orleans, La.; Dec 25, 1999
Good for George Bush. I agree!
The Worst Journey in the World: Apsley Cherry-Garrard
The Worst Journey in the World Apsley Cherry-Garrard
I love the poetry and good humour of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s introduction:
Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised. It is the only form of adventure in which you put on your clothes at Michaelmas and keep them on untilChristmas, and, save for a layer of the natural grease of the body, find them as clean as though they were new. It is more lonely than London,more secluded than any monastery, and the post comes but once a year. As men will compare the hardships of France, Palestine, or Mesopotamia, so it would be interesting to contrast the rival claims of the Antarctic asa medium of discomfort. A member of Campbell’s party tells me that the trenches at Ypres were a comparative picnic. But until somebody can evolve a standard of endurance ,I am unable to see how it can be done.Take it all in all, I do not believe anybody on earth has a worse time than an Emperor penguin.
Even now the Antarctic is to the rest of the earth as the Abode of the Gods was to the ancient Chaldees, a precipitous and mammoth land lying far beyond the seas which encircled man’s habitation, and nothing is more striking about the exploration of the Southern Polar regions than its absence, for when King Alfred reigned in England the Vikings were navigating the ice-fields of the North; yet when Wellington fought the battle of Waterloo there was still an undiscovered continent in the South.
Cherry-Garrard’s wide learning and sense of humour were one of the reasons he survived Antarctica. You need grit of character as well as physical endurance!
The Worst Journey in the World is a memoir of the 1910-1913 British Antarctic Expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott. It was written and published in 1922 by a survivor of the expedition, Apsley Cherry-Garrard,
Here is Wikipedia’s account:
In 1910, Cherry-Garrard and his fellow explorers traveled by sailing vessel, the Terra Nova, from Cardiff to McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. ‘Cherry’ was teased at first by some of the other members of this expedition because of his lack of Antarctic experience, his lack of specialized credentials for the position of ‘assistant zoologist‘ to which he had been named, and persistent suspicions among some of his comrades that he had in fact bought his way on board by contributing £1,000 to the expedition’s troubled funds.
Cherry-Garrard responded to these taunts with modesty, a self-sacrificial ability to work hard, and acute observational skills. He was also, according to novelist, biographer and socialite Nancy Mitford, the only intellectual amongst the crew. These traits were to serve him well when it came time for him to write down his memories of the expedition. They also caught the eye of the expedition’s second-in-command, Dr Edward ‘Bill’ Wilson, who adopted Cherry-Garrard as a protégé.
Dr Wilson’s personal goal in Antarctica was to recover eggs of the Emperor penguin for scientific study.[4] It was thought at the time that the flightless (and “primitive”) penguin might shed light on an evolutionary link between reptiles and birds through its embryo. As the bird nests during the Antarctic winter, it was necessary to mount a special expedition in July 1911 from the expedition’s base at Cape Evans to the penguins’ rookery at Cape Crozier. Wilson chose Cherry-Garrard to accompany him and ‘Birdie’ Bowers across the Ross Ice Shelf under conditions of complete darkness and temperatures of -40 and below. It was this “Winter Journey”, not the later expedition to the South Pole, that Cherry-Garrard later described as The Worst Journey in the World.[6]
All three men, barely alive, returned from Cape Crozier with their egg specimens, which were stored as the expedition swung into preparations for a march from Cape Evans to the as-yet-undiscovered South Pole. This second and much longer march, in contrast with the Worst Journey, was to be done during the Antarctic summer in 1911-1912.
The men not chosen to go on to the Pole reassembled at the base camp at Cape Evans and waited there through 1912 for Scott and four companions to rejoin them, but the expedition’s leader never returned. In 1912-1913 Cherry-Garrard and other survivors once again marched southward, this time to try to find traces of their lost comrades. Cherry-Garrard’s description of the frozen tent that contained three of them is one of the most dramatic sections of the book. Inside the tent were the remains of Scott and Cherry-Garrard’s two companions on the Worst Journey, Bowers and Wilson.[8]
Cherry-Garrard’s description of the closing scenes of the expedition, based on lengthy excerpts from his own journal, transitions first into a gentle and empathetic description of Scott’s mistakes, and then into a written meditation on the themes of self-sacrifice and heroism.
Although The Worst Journey in the World was published only nine years after the end of the Scott expedition, that short length of time had made clear that new technology, particularly caterpillar-tread vehicles and airplanes, would revolutionize future work in the Antarctic and make much of the suffering endured by Scott and his men unnecessary.
The Worst Journey in the World asks, but does not answer, the question of whether this suffering was futile, or whether it would inspire future human beings facing very different challenges.
The Winter Journey eventually became a case study on how a paradigm shift in scientific methodology can devalue data that had begun to be gathered before the shift. At the time the Terra Nova expedition sailed, many biologists believed in recapitulation theory. They believed that examining the embroyos of key species, such as the Emperor penguin, would show how the species – and, by extension, how the family of birds as a whole – had evolved. The expedition’s scientists determined to try to collect specimens based upon this theory.
As the survivors of the Terra Nova returned to England several years later, recapitulation theory had begun to be
discredited. The egg specimens were turned over to embryologists at London’s Natural History Museum, who were largely uninterested in the donation.! Cherry-Garrard describes how he was told that the retrieved eggs had added little to their knowledge of penguin embryology, nor to scientific knowledge as a whole.!”
Thank you, Wikipedia!
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