The Orchid Station

Not long now, and the LOST season finale will be upon us. I'm way too excited about it, gotta control my expectations a little. Right now I'm thinking, if Jesus came back I might ask him to wait a few hours. Although then what about seasons 5 and 6?

I'm just kidding, of course, although it does bring up an interesting point. Why is it so easy to get excited by or distracted by the things of the world? The tyranny of the present, I guess. Still, there is a simple joy to my love of a good yarn, and I'm pretty sure the Big Guy loves a good story too. Now if I can just focus on the story He is writing in my life and the lives of those around me, instead of resisting and trying to impose my own version. I guess we're kinda like diva actors whose overbearing egos make a mess of the movie. I think most of the reason I try to assert my own way comes from impatience. It's not for nothing that patience is extolled as a virtue.

The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him;
it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.
It is good for a man to bear the yoke while he is young.
Lamentations 3:25-27

Julian of Norwich

Where C.S. Lewis meets Stephen King.

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Whole Wide World

Optimism is tricky for me, confidence too. I knew at the time how deeply ironic it was that I gave my valedictorian speech on confidence and determination. Never had a problem with the latter, but the former...not my strong suit.

I'm starting to understand, though, that no matter how much your attitude affects outcomes, you might as well be positive. If attitude affects outcomes, seems pretty clear a positive outlook will produce better results. Or, if your attitude has no effect, basically your choice of attitude only affects how you feel right now, so why make yourself miserable?

I think if I'm going to be more optimistic, the right thing to do is to start taking more chances, to be more spontaneous. Not capricious, but free. I guess we'll just see how that plays out.

Random reviews:
How I Met Your Mother - "Miracles"
Spoiler Alert
Tonight's episode was all right, but really I thought it didn't work terrifically as comedy or as drama, which it veered towards at points. Bringing Barney and Ted back together was already a given, and with the minimal time it consumed in the episode it felt undersold somehow. I guess it felt rushed. Then again, Ted just shutting Barney out like that and pretending not to be upset was silly to begin with. The whole Stella plot felt a bit rushed to me too. Ted and Stella both react so quickly to things; I don't know about you but my feelings don't turn on a dime. He shouldn't have ditched her to begin with, but Gee Whiz, Ted, do you think wanting to get back together with Stella after a near death experience might be a manifestation of the age-old "I don't wanna die alone" feeling? Hardly noble.
The two big surprises at the end were good; I didn't really see them coming. It will be interesting to see how Barney acts in the beginning of season 4. Was it a revelatory experience, or will he resist real feelings for a woman? As for Stella and Ted: is she the mother? It still seems too obvious / straightforward for it to be her. That said, Ted making a proposal is a big enough step on the way to wherever that it makes a suitable link in the chain, sort of back-justifying telling about Robin (if there was no Robin, there'd be no tattoo, ergo no meeting Stella).
I just hope season 4 is closer to seasons 1 and 2. Season 3 felt kinda weak on the whole. And can we have some Lily & Marshall plots that aren't about the apartment, or their jobs? Please?

The Matrix Is The Only Humane Solution

From a purely "secular" point of view, sooner or later (probably sooner) the robots are gonna get smart enough that there won't be any meaningful labor humans do any better than they do. Not just factory workers, not just pencil pushers, EVERYONE will be crap at doing their job compared to a machine. So then what? 6+ billion people all lying around doing nothing? I don't think so. We need something purposeful to do, a raison d'etre as they say. People would go nuts without a purpose, and hedonism as a philosophy can only take you so far. There wouldn't be anything worth our doing in such a world. So - if the machines decide to keep us around at all - they might as well create a fake world for us, and let us feel fulfilled and frustrated and everything else we call being human. Just like in the movie, I guarantee we won't accept an artificial paradise world.

Of course, if God exists, there must be a qualitative difference between what He creates and what we can create. We cannot make an eternal soul. So either we will discover that limitation as we further our artificial intelligence capabilities, or the end will come first, or ... it will look like there's no difference. I gotta admit that's pretty scary.

brief, wondrous

I'm reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Almost finished. It's a good book, maybe upon reflection it will be great, probably depends on the ending. The author throws out the f-bomb a lot; at least, he did at the beginning. I don't have huge objections to it, if it fits with the character and the situation. At least I understand the word, as opposed to the many, many Spanish words and expressions littered through the book. My all-but-forgotten high school Spanish gets me through only the simplest of the examples. That said, I'm learning some of the Spanish naughty words just from context.

One of the big impressions it has had on me is teaching me of the mind-boggling cruelty of Trujillo's reign in the DR, and the devotion he enforced from his people. The fact that such a clear villain - who is often compared to Sauron - has as his main enemy the communists, the lefties, makes me think. In the Third World where the greedy and violent have absolute control over capitalist systems, maybe communism isn't any worse. At least the people who espoused it believed in egalitarianism. Never mind that some totalitarian bastard always showed up sooner or later to seize power and ruin the show.

Review-o-rama

I'm gonna start reviewing things here because, "Why not?" In fact, I think "Why not?" is probably a good motto for this blog in general. So, without further ado:

Tonight's LOST: I can't really review LOST objectively since I'm more concerned with where the story is heading than the quality of each episode. That said, I enjoyed tonight's episode, but it's getting really jarring to jump back and forth between all the different plot lines. I always want to see a likable Locke, and by and large that's what we got tonight. Keamy is the new villain that I love to hate, and he's 100% loco crazy to boot. I hope Ben gives him what for. The most fascinating part of tonight's episode for me was not even the strong clues that Claire is dead or "beyond" or something, but Ben. He's playing a man who believes he has gone from chosen to rejected. We know in the future he regains some of his poise and self-confidence, but right now he is almost as aimless as Locke season 2. You can see just how weary trying to be the "chosen one" has made him. Also: please, please, let Desmond be alive and well in the future!

30 Rock: Very funny, but I was hoping they would take the whole "Producers" parallel thing with Matthew Broderick further. They can ham it up for an "Amadeus" parody, why not this? Also: I'm glad Liz isn't pregnant. Not because it would have been Dennis's, but because I am sick to death of sitcom pregnancy.

The Office: Excruciatingly embarassing. Like every episode. But I couldn't look away. Also, score 1 point for me because it's obvious they are setting up tension for Jim and Pam. I totally called that it would be about her desire to be an artist.

And now for something completely different:

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut: I just read this one. It was like Slaughterhouse 5 in that they shared a dry, caustic style that I take to be vintage Vonnegut (although I grant you I've only read those two books). I guess I would say he's like the anti-Thomas Hobbes: life with authority is nasty, brutish, and short. And still meaningless. I don't believe that, of course, but then I do think we try to ascribe meaning to the random too often. We can't know what God is doing sometimes, and there's no point insisting we understand when we don't. Otherwise you might end up justifying tragedies instead of helping the victims. Humanism is a fully sensible idea, and far better than materialism, sensualism, power-mongering, or any other worldly end, even if it is (as is often the case) carried out in heaven's name. Although I would add that the most fully human being ever is Jesus, and that if we take Him for our leader, and follow His example, our ideas will be humane. So we will fulfill Kilgore Trout's tombstone inscription: "We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane." Although his other inscription is my absolute favorite:

SOMEBODY
[Sometime to Sometime]
He Tried

Banarama Fofama

So, I heard that Banarama song "Venus" on the radio tonight. It always makes me think back to when I was nine or ten and couldn't understand the words. I wasn't sure, but I half-thought it said, "I'm your fetus, I'm your fire, what's your desire?" This was back when all I knew was, a fetus was what you called a baby in a pregnant lady when you didn't think it was alive. So I worried that the song was somehow pro-choice. I know the right lyrics now, but am no less mystified by those who somehow don't see a fetus as a living thing. Or even more troubling, those who do, and don't seem to care. If you really believe life only begins at birth, well, I disagree but in that case I can understand your support of abortion rights. But if you believe life begins at conception, and still support abortion, when do you believe it becomes worth protecting? When does it stop being worth protecting? I am reminded of a quote I read recently by Pope Benedict:

"It may be seen that the 'nos' pronounced by the Church in her moral guidelines, and upon which public opinion sometimes unilaterally fixes its attention, are in fact so many 'yeses' to the dignity of human beings, their lives and their capacity to love."

Groovin'...

No big plans for this Sunday afternoon. Maybe make some time with my Wii for SSBB. I'm really just aiming to unlock the characters so I can bring the game out when I have company over. But "Subspace Emissary" takes friggin' forever. Plus it suffers from being a platformer, using the controls of a game which are intentionally loose. Brawl's controls are great for schizophrenic combat, not so hot at precise jumps.
I'm also reading Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions." Pretty heavy, darkly comic stuff so far. Not guessing that will change. Vonnegut reminds me of Mark Twain in some ways (and it's not just the crazy hair and 'stache). Speaking of Mark Twain, an excellent example of how bizarre divine justice looks from the outside is presented in his final story/novella, "The Mysterious Stranger." Said stranger is an angel with divine powers of creation and destruction, who uses them sometimes arbitrarily and generally against our reason. Case in point: to make a man happy, he makes him insane. Twain wrestled with conceptions of God a lot, I guess. Interesting that he and George MacDonald were acquainted and grew to be friendly.

at-one-ment, as good old George would put it

I've been thinking a lot about theology lately, atonement and sacraments and systematic theology versus revelation versus whatever else. I should state that I believe the most important thing isn't what set of facts you believe about how God works salvation in us, just that He does and that He is intimately concerned in our lives and helping us become more like Him in our words, thoughts, and actions. That said, here's some food for thought:

Here's an interesting quote from Luther:
"I have often advised and still advise younger theologians today that they must so study the Holy Scriptures that they refrain from investigating the Divine Majesty and His terrible works. God does not want us to learn to know Him in this way. You cannot nakedly associate with His naked Godhead. But Christ is our way to God. Those who speculate about the majesty are crushed and led to despair by Satan. The reason for this is that they are looking for answers of a kind that they cannot know, such as for the question: Why did God condemn Judas but spare Peter? And such a speculator argues with God as if with some potter. To keep us from striving to observe God in Himself in this matter, He came into the flesh, presenting the flesh to us, in which we might behold God dwelling bodily, as He answered Philip when the latter gazed at Him: “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). From this, then, you see the madness of those who say that the flesh avails them nothing (cf. John 6:63), though on the contrary God is of no avail without the flesh. Indeed no God will avail for you except the God of Him who sucked the virgin’s breasts. On Him fix your eyes. For you cannot grasp God in Himself, unless perchance you want a consuming fire. But in Christ you see nothing but all sweetness, humanity, gentleness, clemency—in short, the forgiveness of sins and every mercy, etc. ... The incarnation of Christ powerfully calls us away from speculating about the divinity."
What I take away from this is that trying to understand God from the outside - that is, trying to use human reason as a primary means of understanding the justice and love of the Father - is a recipe for trouble. Instead we should put our emphasis on learning about God through Christ, and also (I would say) from the personal / relational aspect of God's interactions with man in either testament. I don't like systematic theology because I see it as putting God in a corner. For example, applying rigid terms and ideas from man-made legal systems to an understanding of the nature of grace, redemption, and election. It's almost like divine logic algebra: if Exists(grace) & Not All(saved) -> Not All(receive grace).

Another quote, this time from MacDonald:
"It is the one terrible heresy of the church, that it has always been presenting something else than obedience as faith in Christ."
This makes me think of the Grand Inquisitor story from "Brothers Karamazov." The church in Spain in the story basically admitted to giving people a system and a pat on the back instead of helping them attain to what Christ wanted for us, a life of following where he walked, and doing as he tells us. It's "too much" for people. I assure you, nothing less will do. Some members of my synod, the LCMS, might take offense to the quote, but it is not (in my opinion) against our teaching. If (living) faith is trusting in Christ, what is to trust Him but to do what he asks of us? To the extent we follow where he leads us, we have real faith. Don't misunderstand me; our attempts will always be feeble and imperfect, at least in this life. But I would quote Lewis here: "if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles."

One more thing I think: Christ died for us in a way we could not die of ourselves. But will we not have to do the same in the end? We must be rid of Self, we must someday be willing to endure all that Jesus did, rather than forsake the will of the Father. If we follow where he walked, will we not follow to the cross, will we not grow into sons and daughters who cry "Abba, Father," even if all sense of His presence is gone? Is this not the definition of the Life we are striving for, the Life Christ has planted in us: to know the Father so well and so lovingly that we would forsake all else, endure all things, rather than be parted from the Father? Hell itself could not contain such a one who knew the Father like that. In fact it has failed before.

Hello, World

Let's see how many references I can cram in, huh? url is from a video game (the inimitable Xenogears) and a character from George MacDonald's excellent-if-somewhat-abstruse novel "Phantastes". The title of this post the classic "first program you write in any language." And of course the title of the blog is from my favorite Haruki Murakami novel "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle." Plus, I guess, Mike Doughty's song also inspired by the novel.

Anyway, no idea how often I'll be updating, but oh well. We'll just see how it goes.