A Fragment on Pascal and his Pensees

This summer I was introduced more fully to the writings of the 17th century French mathematician, philosopher and theologian, Blaise Pascal. Of course, most everyone is familiar with Pascal’s Wager, which, as my professor, Richard V. Horner, says, may not even represent his best work in theology and philosophy. Dying relatively young (age 39), Pascal made considerable contributions to the world of math and science. It is Pascal’s work after his conversion to Christ that really stands out, particularly in the areas of philosophy and theology.

In the wake of Descartes’ monumental cogito ergo sum, a completely rational approach to epistemological thought, Pascal writes to counter reason as the soul apparatus of reality, asserting faith by way of revelation as a legitimate means of knowing. His posthumously published (yet unfinished) Pense’es is described by many to be the finest work of literature the French language has ever seen. Here Pascal lays out, one short thought at a time, a thorough defense of Christianity. He criticizes not the use of reason as a means of knowing, but the use of reason as the exclusive metric for such foundational “knowing.”

The pensees may be read in a variety of ways and is full of incredible insight and compelling arguments on the merits of Christianity. While Pascal’s genius mind is to be honored and recognized both in the realm of science and theology, it is his passion that impresses me and inspires me. Shortly after his death, a reflection of his conversion to Christianity was found sewn into the lining of his coat. It is believed that he wore this as a reminder to himself of the work God had done in his life and of who he was in and through Christ Jesus.

Here is what it said:

The year of grace 1654,Monday, 23 November, feast of St. Clement, pope and martyr, and others in the martyrology.Vigil of St. Chrysogonus, martyr, and others.From about half past ten at night until about half past midnight,

FIRE.

GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacobnot of the philosophers and of the learned.

Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.

GOD of Jesus Christ.My God and your God.

Your GOD will be my God.

Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD.

He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel.

Grandeur of the human soul.

Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.

Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.

I have departed from him:They have forsaken me, the fount of living water.

My God, will you leave me?

Let me not be separated from him forever.

This is eternal life, that they know you, the one true God, and the one that you sent, Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ.Jesus Christ.

I left him; I fled him, renounced, crucified.

Let me never be separated from him.

He is only kept securely by the ways taught in the Gospel:

Renunciation, total and sweet.

Complete submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.

Eternally in joy for a day's exercise on the earth.

May I not forget your words. Amen.

New Release from U2

The Irish band U2 is putting the final touches on a new studio album set to be released in late October of this year. I have deeply admired and appreciated the craft of U2 for a long time. In a world of excess, arrogance and gratuitous, “throw-away” lyrics and music from today’s pop world, U2 stands apart. They have managed, for nearly thirty years, to champion life and to keep the arrow pointing toward the redemptive, both on and off the stage. While I would love to see Bono become a bit more “confessional” regarding his Christian faith, I do admire the causes that he champions. Here is a link to an interesting article from the London Telegraph on how U2 have managed to survive (and thrive) as a band after all these years. If you want to have an incredible U2 concert experience in your own home, pick up a copy of the U2 concert dvd, U2 Go Home: Live from Slane Castle. It is epic.

And for what it's worth, my favorite U2 album is their 1991 effort, Achtung Baby. It was their 7th studio album release and it is a great listen, start to finish.

Wendell Berry Haunts Me part 1

On our relationship with place and its impact on culture:

Few cultural commentators put the dagger in my heart repeatedly like Wendell Berry seems to be able to do. There are some voices that, having read them, haunt you with their ceaseless echoes swirling in the chamber of your mind and heart. Wendell Berry is like Nathan speaking to David, waking him from his own delusion and fantasy. In many ways, Wendell Berry is that cultural prophet, warning our nation’s citizenry of its crippling vices and crying out for healthier, less consumer-crazed lives. Berry is a poet, novelist, essayist and a deeply committed conservationist, whose primary concern is conserving what it means to be a healthy humanity, being human with the place where we live in creation. In a highly globalized, specialized society, Berry sees people being stripped of their sense of place, humanity’s relationship with the land and the unraveling of culture that ensues as a result. He writes, “The concept of country, homeland, dwelling place becomes simplified as “the environment” –that is, what surrounds us. Once we see our place, our part of the world, as surrounding us, we have already made a profound division between it and ourselves.” (The Unsettling of America, p.22).

Berry confounds both those who place themselves on the Left and on the Right. He is incredibly consistent in his stance on the sanctity of life, and has, in my opinion, penned one of the most concise and eloquent arguments for the pro-life position that I have ever read. You can read it here.

There will be much more to say about the writings and insights of Mr. Berry. He covers a vast array of issues that speak to the particularities of what it means to be human in our day and time. For now let me leave you with this, from his book, The Unsettling of America. Here he is commenting on the pitfalls of an age of specialization and the dependence of the consumer. “In our time the rule among consumers is to spend money recklessly. People whose governing habit is the relinquishment of power, competence, and responsibility, and whose characteristic suffering is the anxiety of futility, make excellent spenders. They are the ideal consumers. By inducing in them little panics of boredom, powerlessness, sexual failure, mortality, paranoia, they can be made to buy (or vote for) virtually anything that is “attractively packaged.” The advertising industry is founded upon this principle.”

The image Berry paints of anxious, paranoid, powerless and dependent consumers is haunting and looks less than human- less than the dignity for which we were created (Genesis 1.26-28). Thinking through the solutions and the challenges of re-orienting one’s life away from such blind-dependence is really tough, really sobering. More later…

O Love Divine

The Phos Hilaron (O Gracious Light) was one of the first recorded hymns of the Christian church, but certainly wasn’t the last. Jesus Christ and his redeeming love dominates the landscape of song in human history. In the Old Testament Israel worshiped and foreshadowed the Incarnation of Christ and the church, in response, writes hymnody and verse in reflection of his saving work on our behalf. There have been many prolific hymn writers through the ages; Fanny J. Crosby, Martin Luther, Isaac Watts, to name a few. I have recently been blessed by a hymn text of the great 18th century hymn writer, Charles Wesley. It is believed that Wesley penned over 6,000 hymns through the course of his lifetime. This is staggering, especially considering the theological weight and scriptural centeredness of his texts. These aren’t, “Love me Do” pop tunes, but serious, sublime, and beautiful hymns.

Wesley’s Hymn, O Love Divine, has lately been important to me and a blessing to my thoughts. Here is the text:

O Love Divine
The Gadsby Hymnal #249
Words: Charles Wesley, 1707-1788/Music: Jeff Koonce
© 2006 Red Mountain Music www.redmountainmusic.com

O love divine, how sweet thou art
When shall I find my willing heart
All taken up by thee?
I thirst, and faint and die to prove
The greatness of redeeming love
The love of Christ to me
The love of Christ to me

Refrain
O love divine how sweet
O love divine how sweet
O love divine how sweet thou art

Stronger his love than death or hell
Its riches are unsearchable
The first born sons of light
Desire in vain its depths to see
They cannot reach the mystery
The length and breadth and height
The length and breadth and height

God only knows the love of God
O that it now were shed abroad
In this poor stony heart
For this I sigh, for this I pine
This only portion, Lord, be mine
Be mine this better part
Be mine this better part

This hymn has been newly arranged by the worship artists at Red Mountain Church in Birmingham, Alabama. It exists on a collection of b-sides that did not make one of their recordings. You can download it free, here. They have recorded numerous albums of rediscovered, obscure hymnody. Many of these are found in the Gadsby compendium of hymns. Another group of artists doing a great job of giving forgotten hymns new life are the folks at Indelible Grace. They also have produced several albums dedicated to the renewal of the neglected hymnody in the church.


O love divine, how sweet thou art
When shall I find my willing heart
All taken up by thee?
I thirst, and faint and die to prove
The greatness of redeeming love
The love of Christ to me
The love of Christ to me

Workday, a poem

In the late Summer months of 1992, I had the privilege of working a few days for Clay Chapman. He was building a barn near Zebulon, GA and asked if i would like to help him for a few days before Fall semester at college started back. I am sure I was mostly dead-weight on the work-crew and maligned more than a few nails and defenseless 2x6's, but it was a great couple of days working with a genius craftsman in rural Georgia. Many years later I was able to pen this poem, a reflection on those few days. Thank you, Mr. Chapman. My apologies to the nails and lumber! And if you have yet to taste a sun-ripened scuppernong, I suggest you do so in the very near future.

Workday
e.m. moulton
august 2004 for Clay Chapman

said to be out of town
and in the country
building something useful a barn
a workhouse a life
somewhere near Zebulon GA
somewhere in a fresh mown field

said to be making our way
with saw-blades and hammers
and wood planks
it was our whole lives lived in one span
in one day inside the upside-down
45° angle cuts chattering hammers
and smoke from a burning scrap heap

said to have met the day’s design
and said to have been ahead by one wall
and a raised truss on the east end
that seemed to wait patiently to be dressed
determined not to fret the night away

said to be cooling in the shotgun hallway
of the farmhouse lighted by the open front door
and lined by the sound of steel guitar and vocal streams
from crackling vinyl-
we were awake and still and alive
inside saw-dusted red skin

said to be close to evening by then
riding home full (it is like grace to make full now)
and spent with the scent of the world in summer
while holding a fistful of ripened scuppernongs
from vines off the county road

The Ethic of the Holy Spirit

Put on, then, as God’s chosen ones,
holy and beloved, Compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, Bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has Forgiven you, so you also must forgive.
~ Colossians 3.12-13

This is the ethic of the Spirit of God, that builds the culture of the Kingdom. Putting off the works of the flesh (through repentance and faith), the ethic of a fallen, diseased world, and putting on Christ, yields the fruitful effects of the Kingdom’s in-break in our own hearts and into the world around us. It is in part, our participation in “Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…” The deteriorating condition of a maligned creation is being renewed, is being mitigated, first in my heart, and is a foretaste of that which will come in full at the second advent. So simple humility working in us is by no means a small thing, but evidence of Jesus’ resurrection and exalted glory!

Damien Jurado's World

Listening to Damien Jurado is a journey into the heart of all that's right and wrong in the world, mostly what is wrong. Jurado’s literary style and narratives follow lost loves, perplexed figures, musings on various facets of life’s mundane nature and gross brutalities. He is to songwriting what Flannery O’Connor is to the short story and what the Coen brothers are to film. They all deal in absurd characters, contrast good and evil, acknowledge the human struggle and press toward redemption amidst the darkness. Jurado fills his quiet songs with characters and stories and unfoldings that smack of stark reality, a reality often difficult to hear. His songs place you on the wrong side of the tracks, and into the heart of life’s toughest relational struggles. He takes the listener to the reality of the human condition, for better and for worse.

White Center Damien Jurado, from On My Way to Absence

Heard they shot another

No one knows the reason

It didn't make the papers

It's just another wild night

Here in white center

Tonight they gather flowers

Sunday pack the churches

Morning comes too slowly

For us who feel like victims

Here in white center

Turn off your headlights

Here comes a cop car

Music for the bad boys

Music for the good boys

Here in white center

And this is what I appreciate about Jurado’s craft and art form. In presenting the world as it is, he forces the listener to distinguish from light and shadow, between myth and reality, between truth and lie. We see truth through the moral failings of the characters in his songs and see the desperate longing for hope in a fractured, sinful world.

Jurado’s newest album, Caught in the Trees, will release on September 9, 2008.

C.S. Lewis on Desire

“We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” ~ C.S. Lewis, from The Weight of Glory

So darkened is our expectation of life in the world, so clouded is our hope because of the veil of sin, that we cannot imagine a world righted of all its wrongs; a world of justice, freedom & peace. Yet, this is the Christian vision of heaven, this is redemption applied at the consummation- a new heavens and a new earth under the rightful rule and reign of the triune God of the Universe- Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

It is this expectancy that becomes the trick of the Christian journey. The tension of a Kingdom that has come, is here now, and yet is coming in fullness presents a challenge for the follower of Christ, and still a vision for ultimate reconciliation. We are tempted, as those still under the veil of darkness, to fumble around with lesser idols of our time, passions that fail to fully satisfy. We work feverishly, filling cisterns that we know will not hold water. We labor to build kingdoms of prestige and power that will fail to persevere but that give us temporary relief, comfort and notoriety. “These things,” writes Lewis, “the beauty, the memory of our own past- are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the real thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” (Lewis. The Weight of Glory) To live in the present, joyfully surrendered to the authority of the King who has come and is coming again to make all things new, will direct us away from false idols and vain “self-medications” that cannot yield eternal rest or fulfillment. Lewis’ expectation of infinite joy is realized when we recognize the kingship of Jesus, labor for his name and renown presently and wait patiently for his return. Christ is the reality, the substance that shatters all myths.

“Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.” ~ C.S. Lewis, from The Weight of Glory

"...I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst." ~ John 6.35 ESV

An Offering from Pittsburgh

Ambridge-Aliquippa Bridge
em moulton ~ Christmas 2006


The Ambridge-Aliquippa Bridge stretched out
across the Ohio this morning looking heavy
with the weight of rain soaked into the pours of
its concrete piers and dripping down
from its minted steel forms as morning commuters
inched across with lights on and wipers on and
AM radios on leaving a trail of exhaust
to join the tang of rain and river
of road-top and rusted iron


I too felt heavy walking the bridge
beneath wet clothes imagining the men who cut the roads
from the foothills across the river
and raised the bridge beneath my feet and bolted
the truss-work overhead in the fabrication yard just
downstream and I thought about the time it takes
to make something right to do something well and
to make a way like the span of redemption
taking long its course and how God must glory
in that time and is glorified yet still and
stopping momentarily fixed only on the
river below I traced a log
drifting on the waters
floating quietly toward
release