This post may seem like a diversion – but – it is not – as I will attempt to explain in my next post.

The following is from an address delivered by Karl Barth in the Music Hall in Basel in 1936:

As performer and composer, Mozart always had something to say, and he said it.  But we should not complicate and spoil the impact of his works by burdening them with those doctrines and ideologies which critics think they have discovered in them but which are in fact an imposition.  There is in Mozart no “moral to the story,” either mundance or sublime.  He certainly consulted closely with the librettists for his operas, but not at all to arrive at some agreed upon profound meaning!  We must take to heart what he wrote to his father in 1782: “In an opera the poetry must absolutely be the obedient daughter of the music!” . . . If we judge from his letters, the fact is simply – whether we like it or not – that he was never directly or specifically affected by nature around him, or by the history, literature, philosophy, and politics of his time.  With regard to these he had no special conclusions and theories to present and proclaim.  I fear he did not read very much; he certainly never speculated or lectured.  There is no Mozartean metaphysics.  In the realms of nature and spirit, he sought for and found only the opportunities, materials, and tasks for his music.  With God, the world, himself, heaven and earth, life – and, above all, death – every present before his eyes, in his hearing, and in his heart, he was a profoundly un-problematical and thus a free man:  a freedom, so it seems, given to him – indeed commanded and therefore exemplary for him. (31-33*)

Until next time . . .

*http://www.amazon.com/Wolfgang-Amadeus-Mozart-Karl-Barth/dp/1592444369/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335729158&sr=8-1

Another book that I would recommend for everyone to read is Transforming Our Days: Spirituality, Community and Liturgy in a Technological Culture by Richard R. Gaillardetz*.

Early in his book, Gaillardetz writes of the work of Albert Borgmann who speaks of the differences of Technological Devices and Focal Things.  Gaillardetz writes:

Borgmann asks us to consider the role of the fireplace or wood-burning stove in a premodern home.  The family frequently gathers around the firplace as a localized source of heat for important discussion and family entertainment.  The fireplace must be tended regularly.  To do so one must master a set of skills: knowing which kinds of wood burn best and how to properly start and stoke the fire.  These skills and practices inevitably bring one into contact with the larger world of nature (retrieving and chopping the wood) and with other persons.  They are skills that must be passed on from one person to another.  When it is the sole heat source in the home, the fireplace also creates the rhythm for the life of the home.  The need for its regular maintenance determines family chores, the timing of meals, the gathering of family and friends.

The fireplace or wood-burning stove is a typical example of what Borgmann calls a “focal thing.”  Typical “focal things” are inseparable from the particular context in which they are encountered.  While they produce a desired good (in this case, heat), they do so only within the context of a complex world of “manifold engagement” – a multitextured, multi-layered web of relationships with the larger world – in which other goods, often overlooked, are also experienced.  The wood-burning stove does produce heat, the principal desired good, but it also offers subtler goods derived from the way in which it gathers the household, demands engagement with the larger world, and so forth. (19-20)

By contrast, a comparison is then made with the central heating system – a technological device which provides the same commodity as the wood-burning stove, namely, heat, but without intruding into our lives or placing demands on our time. (21)  Like the focal thing, the modern “device” does offer us vital goods and services, but it does so in a manner that separates the device from the commodity produced.  In fact, that device functions best when it goes completely unnoticed, receding into the background.  One of the central characteristics of a device is its concealment. (22)

When goods are reduced to commodities and procured for enjoyment in ways that do not demand or even allow for real engagement with our world, the paradoxical result is a decreased capacity for enjoyment. (26)

The next few posts will continue to explore how technological devices have impoverished our lives in ways that focal practices would not allow.  I believe that all of this has to do with being called by God to be effective not just efficient.

Grace and peace

*http://www.amazon.com/Transforming-Our-Days-Spirituality-Technological/dp/0824518446/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1335472028&sr=8-3

During my years of attending classes – high school, undergraduate school, graduate school, etc. – I read a lot of books not because I chose them but because they were chosen by a teacher or professor.  Some were read and then forgotten the moment the exams for a particular class were complete, some were read and added to my personal library for future reference or for loaning to friends and colleagues, some have been read and re-read over the years, and a few – a precious few – have become very good friends – resources that refresh, renew, and restore as the journey of life continues.

One such book is To Know As We Are Known: A Spirituality of Education by Parker J. Palmer* –  a book that was assigned by a professor who is responsible for several volumes in my collection of best friends.  I was re-reading Palmer’s book again in recent days and again encountered a section that had lovingly been highlighted by my yellow highlighter in order to be able to find it with ease.  It reads:

This love is not a soft and sentimental virtue, not a fuzzy feeling of romance.  The love of which spiritual tradition speaks is “tough love,” the connective tissue of reality – and we flee from it because we fear its claims on our lives.  Curiosity and control create a knowledge that distances us from each other and the world, allowing us to use what we know as a plaything and to play the game by our own self-serving rules.  But a knowledge that springs from love will implicate us in the web of life; it will wrap the the knower and the known in compassion, in a bond of awesome responsibility as well as transforming joy; it will call us to involvement, mutuality, accountability.

“Love in action,” said Dostoevski, “is a harsh and dreadful thing,” and so it can be.  A knowledge that springs from love may require us to change, even sacrifice, for the sake of what we know.  It is easy to be curious and controlling.  It is difficult to love.  But if we want a knowledge that will rebind our broken world, we must reach for that deeper passion.  We must recover from our spiritual tradition the models and methods of knowing as an act of love. (9)

*http://www.amazon.com/Know-Are-Known-Spirituality-Education/dp/0060664568/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1335192762&sr=8-1

Yet another day where Father Richard Rohr says exactly what needs saying this very day:

“The great thing about God’s love is that it’s not determined by the object. God does not love us because we are good. God loves us because God is good. It takes our whole lives for that to sink in because that’s not how human love operates.

Human love is largely determined by the attractiveness of the object. When someone is loveable, nice, good, and attractive physically, or has a nice personality, we find it much easier to give ourselves to them. That’s the way humans operate, outside of the economy of grace. Divine love is a love that operates in an unqualified way, without making distinctions between persons and without following our personal preferences. We don’t have the capacity to receive that notion! Divine love is received by surrender instead of performance or perfection.”

I encourage you to become a subscriber to Father Richard’s Daily Meditations – http://cacradicalgrace.org

Grace and peace

At the beginning of his Daily Meditation for today Father Richard Rohr writes the following:

Most of us were taught that God would love us if and when we change.  In fact, God loves you so that you can change.  What empowers change, what makes you desirous of change, is the experience of love.  It is that inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change. (http://cacradicalgrace.org)

Karl Barth also understood that it is all about God.  Barth observed that many people think that if they ask God their questions that God will provide answers – an order that Barth found to be completely inaccurate.  Barth said that God reveals information which in turn provokes our human questions.  It all begins with God!  It all begins with God!!

Just like in creation – “In the beginning, God!

As a way of introducing Karl Barth to readers of this blog who may not be familiar with him, I turn in this post to a brief little volume Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart by Karl Barth*.

The back cover of this delightful read offers the following biographical information about Barth:

Karl Barth (1886-1968).  The Swiss Reformed professor and pastor, was once described by Pope Pius XII as the most important theologian since Thomas Aquinas.  As the principal author of “The Barmen Declaration,” he was the intellectual leader of the German Confessing Church, the Protestant group that resisted the Third Reich.  Barth’s teaching career spanned all or parts of five decades.  Upon being removed from his post at Bonn by the Nazis in late 1934, Barth moved to Basel, where he taught until 1962.  Among Barth’s many books, sermons and essays are “The Epistle to the Romans,” “Humanity of God,” “Evangelical Theology” and, of course the “Church Dogmatics.”

This little 60 page volume was originally published in celebration of the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s birth in 1956, and was reissued in English translation in 1986, the 100th anniversary of Barth’s birth.

Barth wrote the following in “A Letter of Thanks to Mozart” in 1955:  Whenever I listen to you, I am transported to the threshold of a world which in sunlight and storm, by day by night, is a good and ordered world.  Then as a human being of the twentieth century, I always find myself blessed with courage (not arrogance), with tempo (not an exaggerated tempo), with purity (not a wearisome purity), with peace (not a slothful peace).  With an ear open to your musical dialectic, one can be young and become old, can work and rest, be content and sad: in short, one can live. (22)

Barth is reported to have remarked that when the angels were in worship that they utilized the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, but when they played they danced to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Barth also wrote:  I have for years and years begun each day with Mozart, and only then (aside from the daily newspaper) turned to my “Dogmatics.”  I even have to confess that if I ever get to heaven, I would first of all seek out Mozart and only then inquire after Augustine, St. Thomas, Luther, Calvin, and Schleiermacher.  How am I to explain this?  In a few words perhaps this way:  our daily bread must also include playing.  I hear Mozart – both younger and older – at play.  But play is something so lofty and demanding that it requires mastery.  And in Mozart I hear an art of playing as I hear it in no one else.  Beautiful playing presupposes an intuitive, childlike awareness of the essence or center – as also the beginning and the end – of all things.  it is from this center, from this beginning and end, that I hear Mozart create his music.  I can hear those boundaries which he imposed upon himself because it was precisely this discipline that gave him joy.  And when I hear him, it gladdens, encourages, and comforts me as well. (16-17)

So let us live and play – enjoying God forever!!!

*http://www.amazon.com/Wolfgang-Amadeus-Mozart-Karl-Barth/dp/1592444369/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334703663&sr=8-1

My last post made reference to Karl Barth and his monumental work Church Dogmatics.  The article by Michael Lindvall that was the focus of that last post also reminded me that it has been a good long while since I have done any writing about Karl Barth.  So this post begins a new series dedicated to Karl Barth.  In the next post I will provide some biographical information about this giant among theologians, but in this post I want to offer and comment on a single paragraph that Barth wrote as the concluding paragraph in Volume IV.2 of the Church Dogmatics which carries the title “The Doctrine of Reconciliation.”

On page 837 Barth offers these words: Love is the indestructible element in the life-act of the Christian.  It is, as we are forced to say, the promise fulfilled already in the present.  Love alone abides.  Everything else which may and must be done, even by Christians and on the basis of a supreme spiritual endowment, abides only to the extent that it is done in love and is thus itself the act of love.*

It seems to me that it really is all about love.  We are told in the Scriptures that the great commandment of all is to love the Lord your God with all your soul, with all you mind, with all your strength, and to love you neighbor as yourself.  If everything that we do is done in love – genuine love – then we certainly should be taking the right path in our journey of living.

I also find it interesting that Barth writes multiple volumes with many many pages, yet on the last page of this volume toward the end of his work he offers this brief summary comment that “love alone abides.”

So love one another as we have been loved.

Grace and peace

*http://www.amazon.com/Church-Dogmatics-Karl-Barth/dp/1598564420/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334586240&sr=8-1

Following a glorious celebration of the Resurrection it is time to begin taking the next steps in the journey.  This post was prompted by an article in the April 18, 2012 edition of The Christian Century – which incidentally carries the sub-title: Thinking Critically, Living Faithfully – excellent words of wisdom for living.

The article is written by Michael L. Lindvall, Pastor of The Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City.  I have had the privilege of hearing or reading Lindvall’s work on numerous occasions and having always been inspired by his words, his theology, and his faithful living.  This article is titled “Truth is proportional: The limits of what we can know” and offers a comparative study of “18th century Swiss-French social theorist” Jean-Jacques Rousseau and theologian, author, teacher Karl Barth.  Following is the text of the two concluding paragraphs of this outstanding and thought provoking article.

The contrast between these two thinkers lies in their utterly distinct understandings of the way in which their attempts to know and articulate truth mattered.  Rousseau’s understanding of the truth of his ideas is in no sense proportional to other truths or to any transcendent truth.  He and his understanding of truth are humble before nothing, not even God.  He dares to imagine that both God and the angels might be illuminated by what he has to say.  It is he and his thinking that are at the center of the cosmos.  In such an intellectual geography, it’s only natural that the angels would cease their praise of God to hear what Jean-Jacques has decided.

Karl Barth knew that his theology mattered profoundly.  He would not have poured his life into his work had he not held the highest estimation of the importance and truth of what he wrote, taught and believed.  But Barth understood that his mortal understanding of the divine truth was proportional.  He fathomed that God’s thoughts were not finally the same thing as Barth’s thoughts.  He understood that his theology and the truth it captured must be set next to his awareness that even the “Church Dogmatics” would end up ‘on some heavenly floor as a pile of waste paper.’ (The Christian Century, April 18, 2012, pp. 12-13)

Do we over estimate the importance of our thinking, our accomplishments, and our human understanding of truth?

Grace and peace

Wonderful thoughts for Holy Saturday from today’s daily meditation by Father Richard Rohr – www.cacradicalgrace.com

To be a Christian means to necessarily be an optimist because we  remember what happened on the third day! We know the final stage of death, Jesus’ leap of faith, was not in vain. He was not put to shame, and “God raised him up” (which is the correct way to say it, and not that he rose himself). Most of human life is Holy Saturday, a few days of life are Good Friday, but there only needs to be one single Easter Sunday for us to know the final and eternal pattern. We now live inside of such cosmic hope. 

Jesus trusted enough to outstare the darkness, to outstare the void, to hold out for the resurrection of the forever-awaited “third day,” and not to try to manufacture His own. That is how God stretches and expands the soul, and makes it big enough to include God.

You see, to love fully is to die! (When you fully unite with the other, the separate self is gone.) What is handed over to God is always returned to us transformed into Christ Consciousness. Easter is the eternal third day that we forever await, but today we are content to live in the belly of the whale, in liminal space, in the “in between” that is most of human life. God is creating a Big Space inside of you. Just wait!

Let us love fully as we have been loved!

Grace and peace

On this Good Friday I offer you a post written by Mary Anne Best (maryanne@third-force.org).  Her thoughts lead us toward prayerful consideration of both this day and the way we are called to live with one another in relationship.

A Reading from the Holy Gospel

 For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.

Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.

Pilate said to Him, ‘What is truth?’

John 18: 37-38

 The Gospel of the Lord

Again, we approach the question: If you truly knew that you had come from God

and were returning to God, is there anything you could not forgive?

Is there anything you would not do for another? Is there not a kind word you would give?

Where would you place your attention?

Would you be concerned about you had achieved, acquired, your possessions, titles?

.

There is a model to follow/enter into Truth,to knowing, to being,

to Life …

to knowing who you are, why you are in world, and what you are.

Is there anything we should not forgive – is there anything we should not do – is there not a kind word that we should have for each other – today, Good Friday, we remember the ultimate sacrifice – so let us remember whose we are and why we are in the world.

Grace and peace