I noticed the first leaves beginning to change on a maple near my home yesterday. In honor of this annual event, I give you a poem by Scott Schuleit, a student at Knox Theological Seminary. This poem was recently published in Pepperdine University’s Christianity and Literature (Spring 2006, 55:3). At first I did not think much on this, but on second and third readings I began to really appreciate how he sees reminders of Christ’s atoning act in something as common as a leaf and have found myself coming back to it. A very Christlike thing to do, don’t you think — finding opportunity to reflect on God by using an object common to the experience of the reader?

Oak Leaf

A poor outline of parched lips.
A blunt spearhead, blood-rusty and brittle with age,
long past its ripeness to pierce someone’s side.
The slender fragment of an old map
printed with the topography
of a far, famine-smitten country,
one ancient riverbed running its length
with branching, thread-veined tributaries dry,
brownish-red runnels brittle, blocked
with the petrified dust of sap.

It still retained a dull luster,
embalmed — the glaze of death
over the lineaments of surface,
the underbelly grainy,
lacking in the gift to grasp light.

Stem like a heart, darkened–
a channel drained and withered,
choked with plaque.
Blackish spots like tumors blossoming,
furthering its flowering into decay.

In my fist I grind it to dust,
rubbing it between my fingers,
sifting the chaff,
culling the grist,
then scattering it
as if seeds to be sown
over the thistle-rich earth.

Scott Schuleit

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Download a free pdf of R. Morris’s 1877 Servetus and Calvin: A Study of an Important Epoch in the Early History of the Reformation from Google Books.

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A great read for a rainy Sunday afternoon is The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. It chronicles the fascinating genesis of the mammoth OED, and the two unlikely men whose eccentricities made it possible. I recommend it wholeheartedly. Besides, with a title like that how could I not?

Yet another reason to love the OED is today’s word of the day which was waiting for me in my inbox this morning: (Click for a larger image)

You gotta love the OED.  Now I need some coffee.

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A bad play is a bad play, and though, like some bad statuary and abominable stained glass, it may assist the prayers of the faithful, it will do nothing to convince the world at large that the Christian religion is worthy of intelligent consideration. And I am not altogether sure even about the faithful; does bad art really do for them anything that good art would not do better? — Dorothy L. Sayers, “Playwrights Are Not Evangelists”

You probably know Dorothy Sayers as the creator of Sir Peter Wimsey and the murder mysteries he so capably solved. She was also apparently a bit of a Christian theologian. A recent book (2005) by Laura Simmons entitled Creed Without Chaos: Exploring Theology in the Writings of Dorothy Sayers offers reflections on Sayers and loci such as the incarnation, the Trinity, sin and evil, vocation, words and language, women’s issues, and a chapter on creativity and art, which begins with the quote offered above and continues,

Nothing has done more to fasten the stigma of insincerity and stupidity upon the Christian religion,” acknowledged Dorothy L. Sayers, “than the horrid florescence of ‘religious’ art.” Sayers, like many Christian artists, thought deeply about the relationship between the church and the arts. She worried in a letter to the bishop of Coventry that “the reason why one doesn’t expect a professing Christian as such to be witty or intelligent or artistic or lively is that we don’t really believe that God is any of these agreeable things or the source of them.” Laura K. Simmons, Creed Without Chaos: Exploring Theology in the Writings of Dorothy L. Sayers (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005) p133.

My sense is that this is changing among this next generation of Christians. Do you think the whole conversation about being ” emergent,” or even the apparent rise in Reformed theology among the present twenty- and thirty-somethings of Christians is evidence of this?

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This video on Martin Luther was produced by the ELCA and is freely available on Google Video. I found it on The Conventicle (an excellent and thoughtful site – well worth your time); so it comes to you via the ELCA, some Scottish Puritan buffs, and a Baptist librarian. Enjoy.

By the way – if any of you know how to embed a video from Google Video into a WordPress blog, please let me know. I’ve tried everything I know. The embedding code supplied by google doesn’t seem to work in WP.

For now, just follow the link.

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Lament.

Weep, weep for those
Who do the work of the Lord
with a high look
And a proud heart.
Their voice is lifted up
In the streets, and their cry is heard.
The bruised reed they break
By their great strength, and the smoking flax
They trample.

Weep not for the quenched
(For their God will hear their cry
And the Lord will come to save them)
But weep, weep for the quenchers

For when the Day of the Lord
Is come, and the vales sing
And the hills clap their hands
And the light shines
Then their eyes shall be opened
On a waste place,
Smouldering,
The smoke of the flax bitter
In their nostrils,
Their feet pierced
By broken reed-stems…
Wood, hay, and stubble,
And no grass springing,
And all the birds flown.

Weep, weep for those
Who have made a desert
In the name of the Lord.

–Evangeline Paterson.

Francis A. Schaeffer, A Christian View of the Church, The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview, vol. 4 (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1982), p.205.

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Commonplaces were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator’s particular interests. See the wikipedia article.

So it’s about time I begin commonplacing.

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Music:

• This post over at the Colossians Three Sixteen blog proffers some of the musical highlights thus far in 2006.
• Remonstrans has great things to say about the Kyiv Seminary Choir, especially track 21: “O Ye Apostles from All Parts.”  You can listen here.

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Literature: I wait with eager anticipation the arrival of the next issue (20:3) of the Oxford University Press journal Literature and Theology, in which Simon Marsden authored an article entitled “‘Vain are the thousand creeds’: Wuthering Heights, the Bible and Liberal Protestantism.” He abstracts the article:

This essay reconsiders Emily Brontë’s place within the theological history of the early nineteenth century. I argue that there is a complex system of biblical hermeneutics embedded within the narrative of Wuthering Heights. In the first part of the essay, I locate Brontë within the key theological and denominational contexts of her family life. In the second part, I offer a comparative reading of Wuthering Heights and Friedrich Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith and argue that Brontë’s use of the Bible is founded upon a liberal hermeneutic that privileges personal, intuitive experience of the divine over traditional canonical authority.

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Art: September 30 is “Museum Day”, when museums across the United States will open their doors to the public, free of charge. To find free museums in your area, go to the Smithsonian Magazine page here.

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