I'm now pretty much exclusively writing at my teleios weblog, which, although it has less snazzy of a design, was in fact completely coded by me (take that, Movable Type!) and exists in a network of a bunch of other cool people's weblogs. So please make sure to be checking that site as frequently as you used to check this one, or better yet go there and subscribe to the RSS feed, or even better yet sign up and choose to get e-mail notifications when new entries are posted.

So for now, farewell from jonathanlipps.com/weblog!

The question is:

And my fear is that the answer is always no. That is what I mean by loneliness.

In truth I don't feel like giving my usual play-by-play of an international trip, but shall instead point you to my other weblog, where I wrote about my feelings upon arrival back in the States. That entry is here.

Wait...I have another weblog?? Yes, I do! I am happy to announce that the web application I have been developing for almost a year at work is finally going live (beta, of course). I think it's pretty cool, and it has a weblog system I wrote from scratch, so I've been writing entries in it for a while now to test it out. My weblog is here, and you can get to the main page here: e4:online.

There's a bit of a description there of what the site is for, so feel free to sign up and play around with it!

I decided that my e4:online weblog will be where I write most things of some interest to people who don't care about my deep personal issues, or whatever it is I've been writing about here. I'll continue to keep this weblog for both those things.

Sorry to go double-weblog on you, but I'm sure you can handle it, and if not...use bloglines and subscribe to the RSS feed for this weblog and the Teleios one. Cheers!

Assuming we survive and make it back OK, I'm sure I'll be posting stories and pictures here!

Basically, there are times when I feel that my heart gets so heavy, so full (don't think of these things as contradictory), that I am unable to contain any more of what it is full with, and it has to be released in the form of some emotion. For me the appropriate emotion has always seemed to be sadness, or whatever you call it when tears come. So on the outside, it looks as if I am sad about something, when really the case is that the sadness is just my involuntary response to the depth, or the power, or the reality, or (especially) the beauty of whatever it is that I am thinking about or looking at or pondering. I suppose that for others, the emotional response might be different. Maybe it is excitement, or maybe it is frustration. For me, it is sadness (i.e., the appearance of it).

I noticed recently that there are really only a few things which make me feel this way. Themes, I guess you could call them, and they recur with frequency. I rarely come upon them immediately or intentionally, but typically after pondering or considering something unrelated. Oftentimes I'll be reading a book and realize that I've been skimming for a few paragraphs, not really comprehending any words, and suddenly my heart is off on one of these themes. At that point I'm effectively paralyzed--I have to sit and soak in the experience whether I like it or not, or find it convenient or not. If it happens when I'm around people, I become irritable. Most often, though, it is the result of music. Since this ties into one of the themes itself, I'll handle the explanation for that later.

So, what are these themes? After a little while's reflection, I believe there are 4 main ones, but, as you will see, they are all really connected. I'm not sure what the nature of the connection is; is it hierarchical or is it a flat network? I don't know. But here they are, my defining sadnesses:

Not having found my one female companion
Don't laugh--it's true, and it is the theme that has been most in my mind recently (of the four), and I'll probably write most about it here. Now, remember what I said earlier, I am not sad in the unfortunate/unhappy sense when I think about my singleness. Rather, I believe that I am having an entirely fruitful life experience, and especially in my human relationships, what with the incredible family and friends that constantly surround me. No, the sense is somewhat more general, almost unrelated to my life per se.

There is something deep within me that resonates with the concept of a pair of separate yet unified human beings, essentially different in their masculinity and femininity, but pulled together in an ever-deepening dance which traces out the steps of love. I also resonate, as you might have guessed, with Lewis' imaginative and deeply true and free account of gender in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra.

You mustn't think as a result of that that I hold to any particular way that male and female are or should be related, whether that pertains to spiritual authority or social roles or even whether it is good to marry in the first place. I especially wouldn't want you to think that I believe this sense I have is necessarily found in every human. No, I can sidestep all those issues; I can even sidestep that fearful Christian question of whether I am supposed to be celibate! I do that because I'm not talking about here about what I think I should do or what I think is good for me or anything like that. Rather, I am describing a part of myself which is core enough to be defining, and that part wholeheartedly embraces the idea of male/female love elucidating God's love. "It is not good for man to be alone," just like, apparently, it wasn't good for God to be alone.

I have had these ideas and desires for that kind of love as long as I can remember. Maybe it was the fact that since before I was born my parents were exhibiting it. Maybe it's the books I read. Maybe it's the fantastical nature of those books, with their fairy-tale romances and their insistence that (despite what you might think), love beats out magic any day. Maybe it's because I learned early on that I could pretty much do whatever I wanted to do, in terms of my abilities, but that all of those things had to do with me. Love requires another person, and to make it good love with that person requires more than brains or physical ability...it requires the heart of Christ.

My relationships, while being mostly disastrous from a certain perspective (and mostly awesome from others, of course)--the perspective of my own maturity (i.e., lack of it)--merely whet my appetite for a healthy and lasting relationship.

Anyway, the point is that after many years, I have decided that the bare fact is that I am made for love. I could be wrong about that, but if I am, it will be a long and painful road to that discovery (so I'm hoping I'm not wrong). In other words, there is a very real sense in which, while I feel completely satisfied in every part of my life, and can't even think of any real practical benefits to being in a serious relationship at the moment, incompleteness lingers. It is always there in the back of my mind, gently pressuring. I have often mistaken this pressure, which is really just a reflection of my deepest personality in believing it is made for love, for attraction (attraction as including but not limited to physical desire)...which has left me in the embarrassing position several times of realizing that I'm not actually attracted to so-and-so, even though I've been telling her this!

Fortunately for me, every other time or so, things "don't work out" before I come to that realization, and I am spared hurting someone horribly. Still, I myself feel duped (by myself) when I gain enough clarity to realize I was going after someone specific, not for any specific motivations, but because of this general push of my heart, when what (I decided) really warrants a pursuit is a specific push, if that makes sense. I don't know that I've ever felt one of these, but now I'm hoping I'll be able to recognize it.

So I ponder this often, and the deep roots into my heart the theme has often led me to this melancholic sadness I'm describing (which is all the more poignant when I don't have any pursuits, like right now).

Not being able to learn all the world's languages
I just realized this is one of my defining sadnesses this weekend. I was sitting at my desk, working or something, when I glanced up at my bookshelf. As I scanned it I noticed all my "teach-yourself" language books, or grammar references, or whatever, of which I have over 20. My eyes moved from Old English to Welsh to German to Japanese to Hindi to Thai to Portuguese to Latin to Greek to Spanish, and at each stop I felt a slight twinge of, believe it or not, emotional pain.

Maybe it came from remembering the times at which I bought each of those books. I was probably standing in a bookstore in the language section, dreaming of how awesome it would be to know such-and-such a language. I probably picked up the book, flipped through it, thought how easy it would be to read it and work through it in the course of a few months if I just dedicated some time to it, and then dreamed some more about being in a foreign land where I could cut through the foreignness with mutual communication, which means of course mutual educating and inspiring.

But life and responsibilities turned my plans to nothing, and now I sit years later looking at each of these books as a dream that has more or less died. Inevitably, though, the spark of excitement comes back, and I once again slip into my dream world of being able to communicate with everybody. Although, communication per se isn't exactly what I seem to want; Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's babelfish doesn't attract me, because it is cheating. Part of being able to communicate with someone is having gone through the process of learning their language, learning the proper context for that communication.

Anyway, the excitement is the pathway to sadness because I know that there is just not enough time in my life to learn even 10 languages, let alone 6,000, let alone the one that I've been creating... Not given the enormous amount of other deep interests that I have. The thought that I will die long before I could ever learn all the things I want to know, and create all the things I want to bring into the world, is one of incredible poignancy to me. Again, I don't think of myself as unfortunate, and of course I realize that the world is this way for everybody, and in fact if it weren't, who's to say if I would find anything at all interesting, without time as a limiting factor that gives meaning to choice? Not that I think God hasn't figured a way through that one; at least I hope he has, or else his Kingdom will be somewhat less than what he promises.

So there is number two--the realization that time limits my fullest expressions of thirst for learning and of creativity.

Loneliness
My third defining sadness is loneliness. This is odd, because I am very rarely lonely, especially now that my dream of living in a loving community which is around all the time is starting to be fulfilled. Nor is it the kind of loneliness that one feels even when tons of other people are around, due to the fact that there is no communication. No, I am not living in a Tokyo apartment building. I have the liberty of sharing my thoughts and feelings with my closest friends (and, apparently, the entire world, on this weblog!), and they have the same.

My next guess was to say that this loneliness I speak of is really just the same as my sadness over not having a girlfriend. Isn't that a kind of loneliness? Yes indeed, and I think this is one of the ways that these themes are connected. However, it wouldn't be right to say that the themes are identical. What I mean by loneliness is less lack of company, or female company, and more the shock of my own individuality.

This should make sense, given how I keep harping on the point that these themes which cause "sadness" don't really have anything to do with anything negative or bad, or any misfortune or any way in which I feel that my life could be better. No, loneliness here is what happens when I realize that, when it really comes down to it, I am myself. It is only me who is me, and I am not anyone else. Obvious, yes, but it means that, at some point, I am going to be some way, and the people I am with are going to be a different way.

The times when my individuality is thus more pronounced are therefore times when I feel that there is a very real distance between me and other people. Moreover, I have this idea that I am different than other people to a higher degree than other people are different than each other. It's probably a false statement, and certainly only true from several narrow perspectives, but I mean...look at what you are reading! Who writes this kind of weird stuff? A handful of people I can think of. The same goes for a number of things which I hold dear--the books I love, the music I love, the ideas I love, the art I love...more often than not, I find myself in the minority. Oh, and let's not forget this whole overanalytic melancholiness which is the subject of this entry...for some reason I feel that the number of people who can relate in experience to it is small.

The result of these separations, which usually happens when I am in groups of people, and for whatever reason I get whisked off by a train of my own thought to some place that I don't think the whole group would want to be, is a sense of homelessness. There is feeling that there is nowhere for me to safely land, because landing is a vulnerable thing and more than likely the current conversation is not an appropriate or understanding place for it.

I am glad, as a little interlude, that I am living in a community one of the purposes of which is ostensibly to intentionally confront feelings and fears like this, and I am anxious to get to the point quickly where we know each other well enough for me to actually experiment with this without fear of pushing people away.

But there it is--all my life I have felt that the thoughts that occupy my time do not occupy the time of those around me, and so I became withdrawn. And just think, this is probably true of everyone in the world, though they might react to it differently...

Beauty
And now we come to the crowning theme, which really pulls the rest together (I now think, after having written all of the previous).

You see, loneliness is beautiful. It is broken and beautiful, but it is beautiful because it is the voltage that allows the electricity of love to move from one person to another. Not being able to learn all the world's languages is beautiful, because it is a perfect picture of the striving of us humans, the good striving, but the striving that cannot be fulfilled in this world. And finally, romantic heartache is beautiful because it is the art of spirit. It is the Great Art, and it is (to my complete and utter surprise and joy) the same between man and woman as between humans and God. We paint with our hearts as brushes on the canvas of the world, using our very lives as the medium. What is the picture? It is the story of love.

Beauty can move me like no other thing. Sometimes I am so overwhelmed by a beautiful song, a beautiful sunset, a beautiful story, that my heart is pierced through with a cold sliver of eternity, as if eternity itself were caught by surprise and accidentally jumped forward like an eager racehorse, ripping through the fabric of the universe to marvel, forgetting that I am not yet made of the stuff of eternity, and it is too real, so real that it injures me.

The end of a song can leave me reeling from a wound like this...so much beauty that I never want it to end, but yet I know that if it had gone on for two more minutes, I might be permanently marred.

The sight of a beautiful woman also has this power, though I have so conditioned myself to look right through the beauty and to how I can gratify myself via a self-constructed fantasy world, that I am hoping I have not forever lost the purity to see holy art in a woman's face, instead of my own greed reflected in her eyes.

The absolute hugeness of the universe, the alien and powerful stars and galaxies that surround us, the endless mysteries that we can never hope to plumb, the uncharacterizable motion of the waves under the moon in places where people cannot live, the answering whisper of the trees on the land, the full-throated joy and recklessness of the mountains, the unbounded curiosity of men and women, the colors we see and the eyes we see them with... The world indeed is a dangerous place even to think about, when very nearly everything has a hidden power to display beauty when least expected!

When my heart comes into contact with this beauty, it cannot contain it within itself, and it is released as--a profound sadness that is really a joy that is really a gratitude that is really a love.

Well, that emotion is so complex and so out-of-place in our world of the even-keel and the efficient, that maybe it is no surprise that I have only just pinpointed it as a core part of who I am. But I hope that I will continue to explore what is happening in me, and where these sadnesses come from. Mostly, though, I hope that God will continue to grant me the grace to see heart-rending beauty in the world (heart-rending indeed, because often beauty is preceded by unforgivable pain and even evil), if only because it is this beauty that gives me the strength to believe in God in the first place.

I didn't really read for edification, but more for enjoyment. While I had a love of learning and of the sciences and all that, I stuck pretty much to fiction, except for a couple years in grade school and junior high where I read every book in the library on astronomy, every book on codes and ciphers, every book on programming languages, and every book on origami. While that sounds like a lot of books, it pales in comparison to the number of fiction (usually trade paperback) books I read.

I stayed fairly well within the bounds of the Fantasy/Sci-Fi genre, occasionally dabbling in YA fiction and the more popular non-fantasy fiction like Tom Clancy novels or Michael Crichton novels. On average, I would probably read a couple hundred pages a day of this stuff, so I very quickly became acquainted with all of the authors I was recommended or found on my own in the library.

I'm not sure why I was attracted to this genre. Maybe it was that when I first learned to read, some of the first books I tackled were the Chronicles of Narnia novels, and the magic of those experiences drew me into worlds that were created to be very different from ours. Maybe I empathized with the main characters of fantasy stories, who usually had some sort of mysterious hidden powers which set them on a great adventure, because I fancied the same thing was true of myself, albeit in a very earthly and more boring way. But anyway, I've never figured out if I really liked fantasy because of who I was, or if I became who I was/am because I read fantasy. Probably both are true to some degree, but whichever wins out, we were a good match.

Indeed, my first read of The Lord of the Rings, in 5th grade I think it was, was a life-changing experience for me. I recognized in those novels a creative act so profound and imaginative and detailed that I immediately knew that I wanted to emulate it, whatever it was. The vastness and beauty of the world and stories Tolkien created had a very deep impact on me, and all the more so because of the linguistic ingenuity and toil that went into developing the languages that he did.

While I had dabbled in codes and cipher languages beforehand, it had never occurred to me to create an artificial natural language, with its own complete evolutionary history, grammar, morphology, lexicon, and all the rest. Of course, I began on one of these immediately. I've since lost all my work for that, and the one or two that came after it, but the point is I've been working on languages as a creative, not an educational, exercise ever since then. While this is a pretty big example of how I am dramatically different (in an odd way) than your average American because of the books that I read as a youngster, it's certainly not the only example.

The main thing my love of reading got me, almost by accident, was a facility with words and putting them together in correct or interesting ways (depending on how I needed to use them). Without ever taking a writing class or wanting to (English was my least favorite subject, though I always made the highest grades in it), I became a good writer. For a young student, anyway. That ability may have left me completely by now, or may have dulled in comparison with the bright stars that are my excellent peers.

So it is surprising that, after beginning at Stanford (even, to some extent, after moving to Florida the year before), I pretty much stopped reading for entertainment entirely. Part of it was my newfound hobby of exploring Christian philosophy and apologetics, which lent more to reading non-fiction texts, but I think a good deal of it was that I started to hang around people more, instead of retreating to a room by myself with a book. While I have fond memories of that particularly comfortable action, I guess I decided that I was just too big of a nerd, and I needed to learn how to make friends and have winning social skills, or something like that.

Then, with the move to study philosophy at Stanford, I spent so much time every day reading philosophy that I had no desire left to open a book, even if it was one that I'd been wanting to read. Also around that time I began to take physical activity much more seriously. I got into running and rock climbing and began to devote much of my free time to those pursuits. They opened up a new and entirely enjoyable world to me of physical discipline, which I'd never been particularly turned off to, but rather had never got into because I was (and everyone told me I was) the "nerd type". Team sports were therefore out of the question in high school, because people would expect me to suck at them and not give me a chance to improve, so I ended up actually sucking at them. Maybe that's why I got into climbing and running first--individual sports where I was my only judge. There is much comparison with others in those sports, of course, but you rarely let others down by sucking. Anyway, I ramble.

The point is, my life began to take a much more well-rounded shape. I am very happy for this, and today, four or five years later, I feel that my mind is sharp, but also my body is in the best shape it's ever been, and allows me to engage by myself and with other athletes at a decent level, at just about any activity (disregarding my current sprained ankle).

We were moving houses in Orlando the other week, though, and so I was unpacking my library of books into bookshelves. Each one that came out was like a little bit of nostalgia, reminding me of the time that we were friends. Some of the books even seemed to sulk accusingly, wondering where I've been. It triggered a bit of a lament, that something which was so important to me, and which I still long to spend time with, has been sort of shoved to the back of my personality. I don't think this is really lamented in my community, as no one else really seems to have been the bookworm (though many of us are nerds, of course), so there's also a sensation of loneliness when I regard this current lack of mine.

I didn't stop reading absolutely completely, of course, and I was very glad to be spending most of my reading time studying philosophy, which I love. It did mean that I would read something like 4-5 novels a year, instead of 40-50 (during my most bookwormy days).

One of the other things I miss about reading a lot of good fantasy stories is the way that they hook into my memories along with music. This fact about music and story was one of the first things I realized about myself when I first began to self-reflect heavily. I can listen to a CD that I used to listen to when reading a particular book, and somehow it will bring back a flood of associations with that story, but also with the time in which I was reading, and whatever else was going on in life then. Actually, I'm not sure if I really like the fact that many of my memories are tied up in stories rather than reality, but on the other hand I don't want to dismiss the importance of story in our lives that way.

At any rate, much of that is to say that I am looking forward to not being able to run or play sports for the next month in some ways, primarily because it means I might be able to catch up on my reading. You see, various family members and others who knew of my love for books never actually stopped giving them to me as gifts, even though I'd stopped having the time to keep up with them. So I've got a whole bookshelf of stuff that I'm sure is really good, but I never got around to it. Hopefully that will happen now.

As a matter of fact, I've spent some good time pretty much every day in the last couple weeks doing some reading. I never used to work through more than one book at a time until I got to college (mostly because I read them so quick there was no need to), but I've been working on a few. I just finished El Alquimista, which is the Spanish translation of The Alchemist, originally written in Portuguese by Paulo Coelho. It's not so much a fantasy story as a fairly short fable with a great story and message. I read it primarily because it was in a genre that I enjoyed, and because I felt that I should work on my Spanish. It actually marks the first novel that I've read cover to cover in Spanish, so I am proud to have done that (even though it was rather short). For some reason the translation of it is much, much easier to read than the translation of Harry Potter that I've half-heartedly picked up now and then. Anyway, I've also read the English version of this book, and it comes highly recommended.

I also just finished a book that Dan got me a couple years ago for Christmas, called Tales Before Tolkien, edited by Douglas Adams. It's a collection of short stories by authors that Tolkien liked, or that influenced him, or that were his contemporaries, and things like that. Of the 20 or so stories, there were only a few that I didn't really enjoy, and it was cool to see what "fairy tales" were like before Tolkien really catalyzed the "fantasy" genre.

As you know if you've been reading this blog for long, I've also been very slowly working through A Kierkegaard Anthology, edited I believe by Bretall. It is fairly heavy reading, but every time I commit time to it, I feel that I am immensely rewarded. In fact, of all the philosophers/theologians that I have read, I feel a very curious kinship with Kierkegaard. Maybe it is his insistence that he is a poet which I resonate most with, or maybe it is his whole-hearted devotion interacting with his genius that I long to emulate (with whatever fraction of genius it is that I have).

In any case, he is almost singlehandedly restoring my faith in the Bible as a text which remains deep and mysterious and fruitful for me to continue to study. I just read a portion of Works of Love, for instance, where he expands on the exhortation, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself". In 20 pages, he said so many interesting and deeply true (I believe) things about love that every now and then I had to shut the book and my eyes and just process. I don't want to blindly follow whatever he's saying, but when I read something of his and feel that I really understand it, I can't help but thinking that it is both insightful, true, and what's more encouraging. On the whole, I think the repudiation of him in the current Christian culture (as the father of Existentialism or whatever) is pretty much unjustified and a result of a shallow understanding of his thought (though I'm not yet a scholar, of course).

So, I'm feeling hopeful as regards reading, and I'm already wondering what it is that I'll pick up next. Perhaps the new Harry Potter--Nyffy and I are going to have a series of reading parties with that one, I think. Stories like that are especially fun to read aloud (though maybe not as fun as The Chronicles of Narnia, because Rowling's writing is so modern; it just doesn't sound like one is reading an old fairy tale), so Nyffy and I enjoy trading chapters to read while the other smokes a pipe--another thing that Lewis and Tolkien bequeathed to us.

Well, there it is--an ode to the place of reading in my love and a pledge not to forget it entirely in the name of "balance".

Ever since the idea for the large community house in East Palo Alto didn't pan out for a number of reasons, I'd been more discouraged about our interactions for the coming year, but now it seems my fears were unfounded, since we're basically all ending up in the same building anyway, sans 1 or 2 in a house about a quarter of a mile away. So really there's not a lot to complain about. We are in ritzy Palo Alto of course, paying an exorbitant number of dollars for rent, and far from the realities that most of the world experiences. But, we hope that we'll remain untainted by the glut of rampant capitalism that surrounds us (please don't take that too communistically) and not get too sucked into Silicon Valley culture and indolence (while affirming and remaining inspired by the innovation and other great properties of the place).

I'm also excited to be back close to my Stanford stomping grounds, which is great for running and cycling and playing on Stanford-owned fields and courts (which we do quite happily even though none of us are really students anymore. In fact, I was driving over from EPA about once a day, whether to visit people or play sports or whatever, and that was about the only driving I was doing since I work at home. This means of course, that on an average day I will no longer need a car, since I'm within a mile of all these places! That's good news for me.

Of course the talk about sports is a bit ironic, since a week ago I was playing Tennis with Justin and had a little fall which resulted, I thought, in a broken ankle. After 6 hours in the emergency room, I learned that it was only a bad sprain, which was quite a relief, but still puts me out of commission for about 4 weeks. I was even on crutches for a few days, which was a new and interesting experience for me, and which I rather liked, but it made just about every action take twice as long. I also learned a great deal more balance, as I had to take my long showers whilst standing on my left foot the whole time.

Another great irony of the week is that our move in day is today (Saturday), but am I even in California? No, I'm in Wisconsin. I left on Thursday for Florida, and braved the airport sans crutches, hobbling along rather self-consciously, as the only way I can currently walk is to not bend my ankle but treat my leg as a big stump, from hip to heel. I spent one night in Orlando, then had another day of traveling with my family to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, where I'm sitting in my hotel room at the moment; we're here for my grandmother's 80th birthday party.

But it's ironic because moving in in Palo Alto was to be one of the crowning moments thus far of our little community, and a very symbolic act, and because it took us about a month longer to get a place than planned, there was no way to avoid being gone for the move in. Ah well, the other guys are taking care of things while I'm gone.

So, there's a lot of excitement right now, and I am looking forward to getting back and setting things in order, and finally feeling like I have a home in California. I'll be sharing a room with Justin, which will be a little tight, but will hopefully also have my own little desk area downstairs where I can keep all my computer and work paraphernalia (which is a massive amount of trendy technology, let me tell you).

Well, I just wanted to celebrate that important milestone in my life at the moment. Here's to the coming year!

This latter fact means a few things: (1) when you pre-board Plat/E.Plat folks, the whole plane basically gets on at once, which defeats the whole point of the boarding-by-group system, (2) every time I try to upgrade to first class for free (something you can do occasionally as a Platinum), 50 or so other people have already put requests in, so it is inevitably impossible (I know, poor me, no first class...), (3) everyone's the trendy on-the-go business traveler with a huge laptop bag or pack, along with an oversized roller bag. All of these things have to go into the overhead bins, of course, which means if you're not cutthroat with your boarding procedure, you'll end up with nowhere to put your own huge laptop bag and oversized luggage. Anyway, just some minor annoyances that you wouldn't even notice if you aren't a part of corporate traveling culture (which I suppose, ironically, I am a part of now).

The more important part about being on a plane is this: of all the places in the world that I typically go, I get the best meditating and thinking done on planes. Something about sitting by a window looking out onto invariably-beautiful scenes (unless we're completely in a cloud), having my ears filled with white noise (or listening to good music really loud, which is more often the case), and having nowhere else to go... well, something about it makes my mind sink deep into my soul, where they can meet and hang out for a while.

Oftentimes they'll invite my heart in as well, but this is generally only if I do get the first class upgrades and it's late enough in the day for me to be drinking (as I am right now, incidentally. I always order the same drink on plane flights--vodka and coke. Today when I ordered it, and I suppose it was only about 10:30 in the morning, I got a funny look from the flight attendant. I suppose it's not a common drink to begin with, and no doubt the whole AM thing had something to do with it. Well, that's what I get for flying east-to-west, I suppose).

But I keep rambling; and, since I have roughly 3 more hours to write this entry, I will probably continue to do so. Reader, prepare yourself! Gird thy loins with the belt of blog-patience. Either that, or secure thy hands with the gloves of clicking-the-back-button! (Sorry, too much World of Warcraft recently...and the Bible, I guess. Breastplate of Righteousness: 600 armor, +8 agility, +7 stamina, +3 fire resistance)...

--break--

...actually, I didn't keep writing this on the plane. I was sitting next to a young woman who looked about my age so we started up a conversation and ended up talking for the remainder of the flight. We talked about everything from philosophy to religion to ethics to family to love to relationships to truth to community...well, as much as you can talk about these things in 3 hours. Definitely the best random plane conversation I've ever had...

But enough of the hard-to-follow skips through time in this entry. My point was about airplanes and how they are for me a place of solace, rest, and meditation. I suppose it is ironic that I was writing about that just as I entered into a conversation, which by definition would make solace, rest, and meditation impossible--but irony or no, what transpired was much better than whatever I would have gained by a few hours' solace.

Nyffy did a graphic design project a while ago that connected various people's places or moments or experiences in which they tended to feel a sense of transcendence. Unfortunately I missed the cut-off date for submission to his project, but I was planning on writing about airplanes, how they are for me a place where transcendence is immanent, where life is (for the moment) pure and I can be honest with God and myself. So I cherish the times spent in the window seat, listening to music and pondering and looking out at the big world passing below, seeing memorable landmarks, like Half Dome or the Grand Canyon, or old or current residences of mine.

But all of the foregoing is merely a longwinded preamble (a pre-ramble, I should say) to the original point of this post, which has not yet been divulged to you but which I have had in my crafty mind from the beginning. Yes, the point is none other than to let you, my faithful reader, know what has been going on in my life! Do hold the applause till I am finished; I know all of you were awaiting this information whilst seeing who could hold her breath the longest.

In short, the last 5 weeks or so have been incredible, primarily because each weekend I've been able to do something reasonably awesome with close friends. First (and this may have been covered in my May update) there was a trip to Santa Barbara, which consisted of much outdoors time, bouldering and bushwacking and scrambling through rocky terrain, following rivers upstream and diving from heights into clearwater pools... Not to mention beach volleyball and Jack Daniels, cigars, and spiritual conversation in hot tubs. [Pictures]

Not to be outdone, weekend #2 took 8 others and myself to Pinnacles National Monument, a few hours away, for a day of climbing and hiking. Dan and I introduced some of our friends to outdoor sport climbing for most of the day, then we had an intense hike to the peak of a nearby mountain to catch sunset over a beautiful valley to the east. [Pictures]

The following week, my boss Pavi came to CA for the Apple Developer's Conference, but we spent a lot of time hanging out in Palo Alto and San Francisco, coding, talking about life, talking about community, looking at the future, and generally having a good time. I'm hoping that that good experience will convince him and my other Teleios cronies to move out west.

That weekend (June 11-13) was Stanford's 2005 graduation, and so there were a number of parties and events I went to to celebrate my friends' successes. I was very graciously invited to Dan's family graduation dinner, which was of epic proportions and quality. Yet even more exciting was the day of graduation itself, which went something like this: 5 or so of us guys went and rented a large moving truck, put on wifebeater undershirts with our codenames on the back and "Su Madre Movers" on the front, and headed to campus.

We were all accoutred for the task (which was soon to be at hand) in various garb. My uniform, apart from the shirt, consisted of a trucker beer hat, aviator sunglasses, headphones, and cigarettes, one of which I tried to keep lit and in the general vicinity of my person for the remainder of the day. Others sported the "gangsta beanie" or the classic 70s headband.

Thus prepared, we took our behemoth of a vehicle to campus and proceeded to scour various residences for booty. Not the rear-end kind, mind you, but that wonderful treasure coveted by pirates. In our piratey case: anything of value, but mostly furniture. We stopped at every dumpster on campus (which has a considerable area), finding gems here and there such as couches, mattresses, vacuum cleaners, breadmakers, unopened bottles of vodka, baseball bats, desks, and the like.

Encouraged by this success, we decided to start going into residences and ask those moving out if they had anything to donate. Often we were greeted by skepticism, but even more often people seemed happy to unload all the things they hadn't been able to sell before moving out. This was no doubt due to the professional look of our "Su Madre Movers" shirts.

At the end of the day we had two truckfuls of items of various worth, which we may use in our new apartment, or which we may try and sell on craigslist. More importantly, we had a day of incredible fun, riding on the back of a moving truck over speedbumps and around corners, smoking cigarettes, stealing things from Stanford students... We even had one very brave female join us for most of the day, and she has accordingly now garnered almost enough cool points to be an honorary Su Madre.

[Pictures]

The next weekend (actually, the next Monday), I drove to Yosemite with Jenna, Emilee, and Em's brother and dad. We were planning on doing a night hike of Half Dome, which is one of my favorite things to do in the world, and which I've written about on two other occasions. On our way, there was some doubt as to whether we would actually be able to do the night hike (as opposed to a day hike), because we needed to be back early on Tuesday. Thankfully, I was able to convince everyone that we would be OK doing it at night.

We spent the day eating lots of food and resting up, and then finally started on the trail around 11pm. The four of us made a good pace, but there was no hurry since we had a lot of time until sunrise. All the sections of the 8.5-mile uphill trail were familiar to me, having done it quite a few times before, and so we made our way with no more difficulty than the trail would have provided in the daytime.

As in previous times I'd done the night hike, we'd timed it well. The previous day had been a full moon, so she was still out and bright. In fact, it was the brightest and clearest I'd ever soon it on this hike, so I knew we were in for a treat at the top. It was, unfortunately, very cold, and though we'd brought many layers of the appropriate type of clothing, the extremely strong wind and at times sub-freezing temperatures were a little uncomfortable. Our early start time proved to be a disadvantage, as we got to the top long before sunrise and had nothing to do except sit and freeze. It is amazing how little you feel the cold when doing the hard aerobic workout that hiking half dome is, and amazing how much you feel it when you stop.

The sunrise came in due time, and actually earlier than on any other day of the year, for it was the summer solstice. The beauty moved me deeply, as it always does, and I felt at home in the alien granite landscape. Time was of the essence on this particular trip, however, so we had to be on our way, after firing up the stove and having some hot chocolate and oatmeal.

We made it back down by 8:30am, where Emilee's dad was waiting to take us four weary hikers back to Palo Alto.

[Pictures]

Not to be tied down, I left a few days later for Orlando, along with my guitar. You see, I was flying home for a very special occasion--the creation of another Nyffy! That's right, Nyffy was getting married and passing his very odd last name to a very awesome (and fortunate in all other respects) lady. As part of the specialness of the occasion, I'd tried to write a song for them, which they ended up wanting performed at their wedding.

I drove up to St. Augustine, on of our favorite places in Florida, on Thursday, along with Andy. We met up with Chris and his groomsmen and had an awesome night of hanging out at the pool, eating Pizzalley's and drinking beer. Someone woke me up on Friday and told me we were going to the Anheuser-Busch brewery in Jacksonville, and so all of us ended up there around lunchtime. We took a tour of the facilities, which was capped off by some free beer and many A-B advertisements. An interesting expedition none the less, and good fresh beer.

Wedding rehearsals tend to happen on Friday, so we did that, and my brother Dav drove up with his new djembe to play along with me. There was a rehearsal dinner, much roasting and talking, good food, and all that should be there the day before two friends start their new life together. The 10 or 12 guys who'd come up to see Nyffy off stayed up late for a very awesome (and confidential) time of sharing and encouragement (and of course, Jack Daniels).

The next morning was a time of practicing the song I'd written, for the infamous Jason Killingsworth had arrived with his own acoustic axe, and I had to teach him the song we were to play. Long before we were really ready, the wedding actually happened, and it was a wonderful ceremony. Chris and Anne's pastor from Gainesville gave a moving little homily on marriage, the old organ guy was right on, and there was much crying in the audience (even, I am glad to report, during my song...which seemed to be executed at the high standard which Chris and Anne deserved).

The reception was joyful and full of good food and drink, great conversation, and of course some crazy dancing. The young men did the customary deface-the-newlyweds-car thing, unfortunately in a not very clever and blatantly crude way...but what can you do? I drank way too much beer while staying mostly sober, and then all of a sudden we were lighting sparklers and chasing the bride and groom to their shockingly sexified chariot. We all said our goodbyes, and I gave Chris a slightly tearful hug, then they were off!

Luckily for me, I have just a few days to see Chris and Anne again, since they are moving to Palo Alto, of all places! Chris got an internship with Ideo here in town, so I am looking forward to living closer to him than I ever have before. World domination will be just a few steps away. That, and all the great beer that I am sure we will brew.

Driving home from St. Augustine was not in any particular way relaxing, however, since the next week in Orlando was to be full of work and unpacking. You see, my family had been building a house near the airport, and it had finally been completed just that weekend. So all of our free time was taken up moving boxes and unpacking them. The house is very exciting however, particularly for me and my brother, since we convinced my parents that it would be a good idea to make the upstairs bonus area studio-ready. That is, it consists of two rooms separated by a pane of glass, so we have a recording room and a control room. Dav and I also just bought a lot of new sound equipment, studio foam, etc... So we are looking forward to putting out some great new Splendour Hyaline music soon.

Anyway, the week was full of driving to and from Teleios downtown (which is a much longer commute from the new house, unfortunately), coding at work, hanging out with folks from work, and unpacking. I got very little sleep, up until the morning I got on the plane back to Palo Alto, which is where we began this story.

Well, I apologize for the play-by-play here...just some things I know I'll be glad to have written later on. This truly was a string of awesome weekends and weeks in between, and here's to hoping that I'll wrote some more interesting things soon!

Because that's what I tend to do when I'm alone--reflect. As the word implies, most of the time I end up reflecting reflexively, that is, on myself and my feelings or desires. Occasionally something not related to me will come up in a train of thought and I'll leave behind my little camp of selfish narcissism to follow it and reflect (if only duly) on it, but for the most part I just wallow in whatever is currently clouding me, in the hopes that the fog will burn off in the bright glare of my intellect. I'll let you guess how often that happens... But reflecting remains one of my fondest hobbies.

Tonight, reflection returned to reminiscence, and I thought back to a year ago, when I was finishing up classes and papers, climbing Snakedike with Dan, hiking Half-Dome with my friends, preparing to drive cross-country with Dav, and saying goodbye to Stanford. The reminiscence aroused a strong sense of nostalgia for me, probably because that particular series of weeks last year is still accounted by me as the best time of my life, in terms of the euphoria related with graduating and moving into the next phase of life, etc...

Driven by that nostalgia, I ended up back at Stanford, which I realized I hadn't visited in some months now, despite it being only a few minutes away. I parked in the Oval and headed slowly to the Quad, which was the place on campus I would always go at night when I wanted to think or pray or feel or be alone. The atmosphere there is incredible to me--the architecture is amazing, and made genuinely awesome by the soft and subtle lighting all around the old sandstone arcades.

At times the facade of Memorial Church is lighted by spotlights cleverly hidden in nearby palm trees, and then I like to sit and ponder while looking at the beautiful mosaic of Christ teaching. Tonight the church was lighted in this way, and as it came into view from the Oval I almost began to cry as the memory of all the previous meaningful time spent there came back as experience.

What's more, I had the luck to be walking towards the church as some chorale group was giving a concert inside. These are my favorite times to be in the Quad, because I can go sit in the rose garden to one side of the church, and hear the music bleeding in ghostly strains from the stained glass windows, an audible analogue to the light from the windows, soft and wavering, barely pushing through the color.

So I sat and continued my reflection and remembrance, becoming increasingly emotional as I remembered all the things that had transpired in the last five years, and how they have made me into who I am. I decided that I have become this way, curiously, not just because of Stanford and my experiences here, but in many ways, in spite of them. I reflected that Stanford probably didn't want me to turn out exactly how I did. What's more surprising, I don't think some of the more anti-"Stanford" elements of my experience here (Christian groups/culture, for example), would have really wanted me to turn out this way, either! I feel like I've become something new and, importantly, exactly what I want to be at the moment.

Nostalgia and reflection also have a tendency to cause me to revisit my current state of loneliness (not in the community sense; the romantic one) and engage in some very useless, pathetically sad, wishful thinking. As I said before, I don't know where these things come from, but I see them as forming some of my core struggles with God. Some struggle with faith--believing that God is real or that he works in the world. Some struggle with identity or purpose--who they are or what God wants them to do. I've struggled with these things too, but only, it seems, on the road to struggling with love. They've never occupied my every waking thought; I could put the struggle aside and go on with life. That's been much harder with this new contest.

But at any rate, it should be said that I am certainly more annoyed than you, the reader, that all of my otherwise-interesting ramblings eventually degenerate into painful whining for a girlfriend. That itself is a large part of the problem. Oh well, patience is the order of the day, and so I ask you all to have patience with me while I learn also to have it. That, or stop reading--but who'd want to experience that kind of withdrawal?

Enough of the result of tonight's reflections. I wish they'd involved more of the non-personal things I've been thinking about lately, for instance the extremely stimulating philosophical discussion on the nature of language and grammar that I had today with Nick and Justin. But alas, I am now and will always be more driven by the thoughts of love or nostalgia than any important philosophical question. I am glad, though, that I am back here at Stanford, illusorily lonely or no, and can once again visit the Quad at night, or go for a smoke in the rose garden and hear angel-song drifting from the church.

One of those topics was the death of apologetics as a useful Christian enterprise--not that we no longer need to study it, but that it is no longer sufficient on its own to do any real good for the world. I won't get into my reasons for thinking this (which would take a real weblog entry that I don't feel like writing), but instead note that thinking about this topic was occasioned by going through my old e-mails. You see, I've kept every e-mail I've ever sent or received since early 1999. For some reason, I felt like switching from Entourage to Mail 2.0 as my default e-mail client, and so I had to import my Entourage folders into Mail. Mail started importing, but as the e-mail count reached 20,000 before the progress indicator got to 50%, I decided that some cleaning up was in order.

I went back to Entourage and decided to go through all my archived e-mails and permanently delete the unimportant ones--you know, the mass mailings, the spam, and the like. Let me tell you, going through thousands of e-mail messages by hand is not a quick or easy task. But it had some fringe benefits. I got to skim over a lot of the things I wrote and received in the process, and some of it was shocking. Not so much because it was bad, but because it exhibited a personality and a faith which are so very different from those I have now. Anyway, much of my time in 1999 and 2000 was devoted to studying and disseminating apologetic concepts, so much so that in a number of e-mails I wrote to people about my Stanford acceptance, I claimed that the only reason I was going was to set up an apologetics ministry to those "smart kids".

I read stuff like that and smiled...such passion and naive pride, unaware of the events that were to unfold which would cause a revolution in how I saw God, my faith, and even (in particular) my reasons for being at Stanford. Now, after 5 years of intense study, I hope (and think) I've come away with a more healthy and humble view of my ability to desire and understand truth.

So there's an example of some of the things I've been wanting to write about. I've also wanted to log some recent events in my usual over-flowery prose, for posterity. I can't recall when the last time I really wrote anything of substance was, but since then I've flown back and forth to Florida a number of times, once for my brother Dav's graduation from the University of Florida. It was a wonderful time, and I was proud of him--he double-majored in philosophy and political science, in only three years!

Of note, my whole family came out here to San Francisco a few weeks ago, and we had a retreat of sorts that lasted 3 or 4 days. We spent some time up in Napa, and even had this complete health spa experience, replete with mud bath, mineral bath, sauna, massage, etc... It was absolutely incredible, though of course overpriced. We were also able to do some hiking in Muir woods, watch the Godfather trilogy, hang out at our apartment in SF, and have a good number of philosophical/theological conversations. At any rate, it was a much-needed break and together-time for all of us, despite the philosophical conversations.

I've also started flying back to Orlando (from my rather undefined home here in East Palo Alto / Palo Alto) for about a week a month, in order to check in to the Teleios (no longer Excelsis) office. This last week was one of those weeks, and I spent it holed away in Pavi's office, coding like mad. It felt good to sprint for awhile, especially since I've felt recently like I've been more or less treading water with work. Well, no more! I've got enough on my plate now to last me to July. What's better, it's stuff that I enjoy thinking about--very creative app design stuff with which the details of which I won't bore you.

Unfortunately, this is where the brightness and happiness ends. For some reason, the last month or so has had more than its share of hardships (relatively speaking, of course--emotionally, I'm sure I have things easier than just about anyone else). Of some note are the physical ones: I've had a pretty high standard for my physical ability recently, particularly in the areas of rock climbing, running, and ultimate frisbee. Unfortunately, a sort of recurring knee injury has come back in full force and severely limited my ability for and the enjoyment of those activities. That, and I'm beginning to think that my computing habits are taking their toll on my neck, back, and hands, and wreaking all sorts of havoc. Then there is a laundry list of other minor things that are wrong with me from head to toe, all of which I should have seen a physician about months ago, but have been putting it off. That's got to change.

I haven't touched my guitar or keyboard in a few weeks, and I've been feeling decidedly un-creative. I've got to use creativity for work projects, and for some other things I've been developing, but I've been frustrated with my lack of artistic progress. I have so many things in my head that I feel would make worthwhile songs, but every time I sit down to write lyrics or otherwise solidify the idea, I'm unsatisfied. The idea is either too cynical or not cynical enough. Not original enough. Too inauthentic. Or any other of a number of things which make me despair.

But most importantly, things with community out here have been more frustrating than normal. As you know, I moved back out to Stanford in January to work with a community of friends on how we can be church, in some meaningful and important sense which we've been trying to discover together. One idea we were throwing around was whether we should try and get one big place and all live in it together, reminiscent of monasticism, or the early church, which everyone is so fond of pointing at. We've been thinking about this idea, and how it could fit in with our larger goals and values, for a number of months now. I was a pretty big proponent of the plan, for a number of reasons, and despite all the trials I foresaw as a result of it. In our discussions, it seemed like people (roughly 8 of us) were excited about the idea and open to moving forward with it.

Last week we had a meeting to make a decision once and for all on the issue, because we couldn't put off looking for housing any longer if we were going to do it. And all of a sudden, the idea kind of fell apart. For a few not-bad reasons, some people had to say they couldn't be a part of it, and as a result others couldn't (it's complicated), and as a result, poof! It was gone. Not just "it"--the dream was gone. Now, I have to trust the process we went through, and I have to realize that the community house idea was an idea which was always only meant to be ancillary to the larger community vision which all of us still share. Still, I saw it as something which would particularly challenge and grow us and push us towards realizing that vision, while challenging societal norms, being provocative, etc...

Add to that a general lack of momentum with community things (various events which we were trying to hold regularly just haven't happened, and none of us have really been pushing forward to make them happen, whether because of being out of town or being busy or whatever), and it's kind of depressing. For the first time since November, I'm sensing a real lack of excitement amongst us. I can't decide where this is coming from, but it's not fun and I'm not sure how to proceed. It's a hard time of the year, anyway--many of us are finishing school and moving away, others are going away temporarily, yet others are going on small trips here and there... So there's a real practical inability to be committed in the way that I would want us to be, and without that the whole heart of the community suffers.

My heart also decided it would be a good time to wrestle with its nemesis--love. Or the lack of it. Or the desire for it. Or the misunderstanding of it. Or all of the above. There's no need to detail my inner train of thought whenever my mind happens to alight on something which relates to love (which is about, oh, every 5 milliseconds). I'm sure it's more or less the same for everyone. What's interesting, and frustrating, is that I feel I've never been so (a) desirous of love, and (b) desirous of not desiring love in the way I have been desiring it, at the same time. The first is easy to understand. Everyone goes through that at some point, some more than others (let my bitterness tell you in which camp I belong).

The second is a bit harder, but part of it comes from a realization that most of the pain I experience is a result of my chasing after love without heeding wisdom or the possibility that I am likely blinding myself on some things just in order to have a chase. This leads to a distrust of the heart.

I'm left in the very uncomfortable position of desperately dreaming of love and feeling ready to begin to explore it in the way that it is meant to be explored, and yet realizing that anything I myself do towards that end is likely to be unwise, deluded, and futile. It's like...say you're a runner, and there are runners all around you heading towards the finish line. So you're pretty sure that you're supposed to be heading towards this finish line too, but you know that if you take one more step, your legs will fall off, thus preventing you from reaching the line. So you stop, but that means you don't get there, just the same as if your legs had fallen off.

The answer? You need someone to carry you. But that depends on someone else. And my mind can't think someone else into being, or think them into carrying me. Thus, impasse. And a bit of frustration with the Someone that is most obviously into carrying people, that he is apparently not.

Anyway, enough ramblings for now. I should go to bed, and hope for a different view tomorrow (view of tomorrow).

But before I do, some albums to check out that I recently got:

• The Forgotten Arm, by Aimee Mann
• Funeral, by The Arcade Fire
• On My Way to Absence, by Damien Jurado
• Picaresque, by The Decemberists
• Headphones, by the Headphones
• Woman King, by Iron and Wine
• The Everglow, by Mae
• Summer in Abaddon, by Pinback
• Talking Voice vs. Singing Voice, by Starflyer 59

Yes, that does mean my horrendous CD-buying habits are back.

We had a regular, rousing philosophical discussion, and I was glad to once again be defining terms and weighing the morality / consistency of whatever actions we were considering. Despite my decision not to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, it seems I haven't lost the taste for it entirely. Anyway, I'm not going to talk about that discussion per se, but instead one of the paradoxical conclusions we came to as a result.

Basically, there is a deep sense in which God, the creator and sustainer of the universe, and Lord of all life, is unsatisfied. There is a deep sense in which he is sad. At first glance, this looks contradictory; how can a being who is wholly x (where x is any positive property), experience dissatisfaction or sadness? How could he experience pain? Doesn't a perfect existence preclude pain? Certainly our (well, American Christianity's) concept of heaven, as a state of unending perfect existence, doesn't usually come with pain.

Our answer, as you might expect, had to do with the self-limiting nature of creating beings with truly free wills (which in itself is an area ripe for exploration, and gives new and tremendously insightful meaning to Christ "humbling himself and taking the nature of a servant"). But as I was reading Kierkegaard (his Philosophical Fragments) today, I stumbled upon another understanding, which has the sorrow of God as being, not merely the logical result of having to share the will space, but actually essential to his character--a result of his deep love for us. This isn't particularly related to the question of justice, but I think it is even deeper. Here's a passage:

Not in this manner, then, can their love be made happy, except perhaps in appearance, i.e. in the learner's and the maiden's eyes, but not in the Teacher's and the king's, whom no delusion can satisfy.

(Here, "love" refers to the love of a king for a humble maiden in a story referenced earlier, and the love of God for us, which was the analogical purpose of the king/maiden story. The talk of delusion goes back to the point of this part of the work, which is to attempt an answer to the question of how the king (God) could ever be sure of the humble maiden's (our) love for him, and how their love is mutually understandable)

Thus God takes pleasure in arraying the lily in a garb more glorious than that of Solomon; but if there could be any thought of an understanding here, would it not be a sorry delusion of the lily's, if when it looked upon its fine raiment it thought that it was on account of the raiment that God loved it? Instead of standing dauntless in the field, sporting with the wind, carefree as the gust that blows, would it not under the influence of such a thought languish and droop, not daring to lift up its head? It was God's solicitude to prevent this, for the lily's shoot is tender and easily broken. But if the Moment is to have decisive significance, how unspeakable will be God's anxiety!

(The "Moment" is a complicated concept to elucidate, and it is what the whole work is about. Basically, it is about how we come to know eternally True things. Socrates' view was that it is impossible to seek to know Truth, because if you already know it you cannot seek to know it, and if you do not know it, you do not know what you are seeking. His resolution is that we all have Truth latent within us, and it just needs to be "remembered". Socrates, in his own view, simply helped people to remember in this way--he did not teach them in any real sense. Kierkegaard's observation is that this act of remembering is much less significant than a deep "coming to know", and so it minimizes the moment in which you "remembered" it. In other words, real conversion would be impossible! So Kierkegaard tries to think of another paradigm of Truth, where it is not latent within us but we are actively running away from it, as a result of free choice. The Moment gains significance now, in that we need a Teacher who will not just provide us with the stimulus to realize Truth, or the content of Truth, but must even give us the ability to comprehend it!)

But here's the part I liked the most:

There once lived a people who had a profound understanding of the divine; this people thought that no man could see God and live.--Who grasps this contradiction of sorrow: not to reveal oneself is the death of love, to reveal oneself is the death of the beloved! The minds of men so often yearn for might and power, and their thoughts are constantly being drawn to such things, as if by their attainment all mysteries would be resolved. Hence they do not even dream that there is sorrow in heaven as well as joy, the deep grief of having to deny the learner what he yearns for with all his heart, of having to deny him precisely because he is the beloved.

So we have here a fundamental paradox (or tension if you think paradox means contradiction) in the heart of God. Love demands that the lovers unite, and share their love! But the ontological inequality of humans and God (i.e., the humble maiden and the glorious king) demands that the king not reveal himself to the maiden, lest his magnificence destroy her (or worse, cause the magnificence to be the object of her love and not the king himself, which is again the death of love). It looks like God has a self-destructive goal: to unite with us in love entails that we (or the love) are destroyed, but if we are destroyed, there is no one with which to unite! What incredible sorrow this must be.

What is God's response to this tension? To "not consider equality with God something to be grasped", to become more humble than any human being (with "no place to rest his head"), in order to win our hearts in such a way that (a) our response of love is not a delusion, and (b) we are not destroyed.

Well, I wanted to share that because I don't think I ponder often enough the humility of God, even the tentativeness that comes across here in the analogy of human love--in Kierkegaard's terminology a care not to offend us. There is something central to our faith here, and it is, I think, the primary take-home point of the Incarnation--God took the nature, not just of a human, but of a servant. God, himself, put himself at our service, in the most humble way possible (dying), in order to ask for our love. And this was the only way to do it so that both he and we would be satisfied that our love is real, and not an illusion.

Sorry, PC folks--this is a Mac OS X-only application. And moreover, I don't imagine that it will be extremely useful for everybody. But, if you ever want to rate your entire library, it will save you precious seconds many times over, equalling a great increase in efficiency. I've found it to be so, anyway.

Well, I'd appreciate any comments if anyone happens to try it out!

It's kind of funny--I left my nice guitar in California, so we recorded using Dav's cheap Yamaha, and we're in a small apartment so we couldn't record acoustic drums, hence the electronic ones, but it turned out to be one of our better recordings! I think we're finally getting the hang of this process. No bass or anything yet; it'll come when we record the song for real to go with an album. But for now enjoy it, and let us know what you think.

I realized that this must be how God can choose to see the world--not just as better than it is, but as it actually will be, redeemed and full. No fire and charring of the elements, maybe--I believe, right now, that God's redemption and revolution will come in a way we do not expect; it will come from the inside out. Just as Christ died and was transformed, not destroyed, into something new and magnificent that heralded the truth and the promise for the rest of humanity, so the entire world will be remade, not undone. In a way, of course, remaking is undoing, and it is in this sense that the old heaven and the old earth will pass away. But they will pass away, leaving in their places, not new versions of themselves, but themselves, new.

At this point in my reverie, the sun broke over the eastward hills, brilliant and uncontrollably powerful, turning everything that was colorless (bloodless) and ghostly (dead) colorful and alive, full-bodied and recklessly physical, joyful and singing. The world around me was resurrected in a commemorative play that God had instructed his creation to perform, acting out the Resurrection that happened to one man long ago, and that will one day happen to each of us, and each blade of grass, and each far-flung star, if we keep hope alive.

Just as soon as it came, the moment, that window into God's promises, passed with the sun behind the gray clouds that were to obscure it for the rest of the day. Though the warmth of the memory remained to comfort me in the chilly cold of the morning, the veiling of the light was a reminder that the time we hope for is still not yet, and all that we can experience for now are previews--previews that change the world, but previews nonetheless. The real show will come later, and at that time we will see the real playwright's best work, and we will all of us drop to our knees in awe, because that work will be love for us, demonstrated mysteriously (openly) from the beginning of time until its end.

In other words, HE IS RISEN INDEED, and this curious, absurd truth is the only thing that can give us hope for ourselves and the rest of the world, because it is oftentimes the only thing we can point to where creation has gone the right way, the way it was supposed to go; that is, sans death. 2,000 years of time and, more effectively, our own various doubts, muddle that picture for us, but we cling however tenuously to it, knowing that, not just is the world without this hope a cold and hard place (in fact, our hope does little to change that many times), but, indeed, without this hope there is no world at all, no sense for even our doubts.

And that is why, incidentally, I believe it--because of the difference between eighteen seconds before sunrise, and eighteen seconds after.

⁴²They devoted themselves to Rick Warren's teaching and to the megachurch parking-lot traverse, to the breaking of small tasteless crackers and to special music. ⁴³Everyone was filled with boredom, and no wonders or miraculous signs were done by anyone at all. ⁴⁴All the believers were isolated and had nothing in common. ⁴⁵Hoarding their possessions and goods, they gave erratically, and only out of guilty feelings. ⁴⁶Every once in a while they carefully exited their suburban mansions, going to one of a million disparate meeting places, and avoided eye contact with the people around them. They broke bread in their cars on the way to soccer practice and ate apart from one another with troubled and lonely hearts, ⁴⁷wondering where God was and suffering both the scorn and the indifference of the people. And the Lord took away from their number daily those who believed.