I have always written. To me it should be a normal function of living for every person on the planet. My poetry site www.delmarscove.com has traditionally been the repository of all this scribbling. While it's a nice thing to have, I have come to think of it as a kind of vanity. Blogs, I suppose, can be equally vain, but to the extent that they are an interface between oneself and an intimate community of friends, they can be useful. Having a second website that I pay money for and spend time updating, however, seems superfluous and rather self-agrandizing. At the same time, my sense of grandeur tells me that there might be people out there who want to read my poetry, and that instead of having to dig through blog posts, would like a convenient way to get to them. As a result, I have launched yet another site, Delmar's Cove a la Blogger, where I have already posted a bunch of my stuff. As soon as my domain name renewal for delmarscove.com comes up, however, I will be cancelling it. This way, I have a place to put my crap that takes minimal updating and that interested readers can subscribe to via RSS. In honor of the death knell of delmarscove.com after a decade of being owned by yours truly, here's two poems:

Consumed

The candle flares
Dancing to wind like music
And the darkness quivers
Unnerved by such dauntless show of shine
And the breath that blows
Is not seeking to extinguish
But to remind that fire is to burn
And though burning must consume --
Consumption leads last to death
But first
To the brightest kind of life.

-

Couch with Wife

Her legs extend themselves
Deploy toes like emissaries
Who receive each other
Like teeth on a cog
Only to disengage
And wander off scratching.

Scholars have raised their voices in a clarion cry declaring the death throes of Postmodernism, exclaiming in epic prose that the Old is finally passing away, and that the New dawns like some salvific sun. The tone of these works is like that of a space colonist, who somehow wrestled herself away from the accretion disk of a black hole, blazing a trail for the rest of the colony to follow. Why? What's so bad about Postmodernism? We have won an academic showdown versus the staunch old-school: no more Holy Centers that we must orbit around until we die respectably. We have humor, irony, play!

The frontiersmen would offer that while Pomo is good fun, after awhile it gets really depressing, and therefore it does not work as a complete response to the Real. How does one evaluate the efficacy of a response to the Real anyways? For starters, in order to respond to reality, you must engage it. Postmodernism fails to present us with any new ways to engage. Postmodernism's chief weapons are re-treat, re-peat, re-move. To embrace Postmodernism's play and sacrilegious humor, it is like a teenager who has lost her virginity, and instead of exploring a healthy relationship, she hides in her closet and masturbates until she is numb.

There is nothing heroic about moving past Postmodernism. Every other institution has plowed forward resiliently. Even the "fallen monoliths" like Christianity have patched themselves up and moved on. It is time for the arts to follow suit. So what is The Way, where is the Shining Path? Is it some new and wondrous ontological model? Is it admitting there is a God? Is it the dethroning of Capitalism? Unfortunately, the answer is much more mundane: context. Context is everything.

The scientists have known this since 1935. When Einstein announced that what he had discovered in the behavior of very small things was "spooky", scientists did not run around their laboratories with chainsaws and set fire to the old text books. Instead, they fervently experimented, toiled, and discovered that depending on the context, the very laws of physics can change significantly. Hence when things get super small, we use Quantum Mechanics instead of traditional Physics. A new chapter was added to the old text book, a new lens was added to the microscope, and instead of throwing away millennia worth of scholarship they were able to invent entire new fields of study, like Quantum Computing, Quantum Communications, even Quantum Teleportation. This is how real frontiersmen behave.

Even the religious scholars, those lost cousins of the text who have been removed (and who have regrettably removed themselves) from "secular" academia, have understood this. There are T-Shirts at seminaries which read "Context is Everything." For them, to say that God created a universe where meaning and truth can never be conveyed or obtained, and then proceeded to toss His Divine Revelation in their laps would be a cruel joke. It would mean the end; time to close up shop. The answer for them, however, was conveniently in the text itself. The Word did not become an endless diarrhea of more words which lapse into infinity. As John writes, the Word became flesh and made its dwelling among men. In other words, instead of existing in some ontological vacuum, the Word obtained a context. The apostle Paul sums this up rather well: "Everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial." It is not by ignorance that they search for meaning in a text. They use sophisticated methods to analyze the context of the words in the sentence. The context of the words in the paragraph. In the book. In the work of the author. In the work of the author's contemporaries. They determine the most probable intended audience and analyze them. They look at how those words have been historically received. They look at modern contexts where these words might be employed. And even then, they conclude with a probable meaning. But it is upon the shoulders of these probable meanings that they bravely reach higher. Just because the answer is tentative, complicated, and arrived at by much labor does not negate it altogether.

To say that there is no meaning is cowardly, lazy, and stupid. The fact that we exist here (whatever here is) together, and that we can see each other, and that we can touch and influence each other, is proof enough that there is such a thing as meaning that can be conveyed. Granted, there will always be signal attenuation and loss. Static on the station of reality does not warrant turning off the radio. In fact, we couldn't turn it off if we wanted to. You can't stop the signal. The trick is to learn to broadcast clearly. To know who you are, to know your medium, and to know your listeners. It's not about being commercial, it's about being effective. Writing words on a page does not seal the meaning up in a hermetic plastic baggy. Words on a page represent a dialogue between whoever wrote them and whoever reads them. This dialogue, however, must lead somewhere. Even if the original intention of the author is compromised, or whatever the reader would like to hear is not delivered, the most probable meaning of the text must be flushed out and digested. Yes, it depends on whoever is doing the flushing, and what methods they use, and what they use the resulting meaning for. But this is why it is a probable meaning. Tentative, complicated, but a meaning nonetheless.

Whether or not there is a center is still up for grabs. The outcome of that battle, however, will not be won by those who can most obfuscate a text. Not by the ones with the most clever, fatalistic jokes. It will be won by those who do their homework, find something to say, and then step forward and declare it clearly and without fear, taking into account who they are, what their medium is, and who it is that might be listening.

Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat

What??? Seriously?!? I thought that invading two sovereign countries, overthrowing their secular dictators, and declaring "war on terrorism" would just make all those radical Islamists get all scared and go back to peddling poppy seeds. Who would've thought?

In other news, God has stricken Bin Laden with Typhoid and Bush with low approval ratings.

Can anyone show me where it is written in the law book of what not to do if you're a public figure that you can never ever admit that you are wrong? My opinion for Bush, for instance, would go up several notches if he would just admit that he has made some mistakes (i.e. claiming there were WMD's in Iraq, claiming that Iraq had anything at all to do with 9/11). The vatican released yet another statement which again insists that if people would read what the pope said in context, they wouldn't get all upset about it. Great. Now the vatican is saying that Muslims can't read. Sheesh.

When the new pope got elected some dude happened to guess his papal name before the fact and bought the rights to the internet domain name. When asked if he'd been approached by anyone to buy it, he admitted that some porn folks had wanted it. When asked what he would sell it for to the vatican, he said:

"Complete absolution, world peace, and one of those hats."

In one recent speech made by the pope he made the mistake of publicly quoting 14th century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus' criticism of Islam:

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached... [v]iolence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul."

What in God's name possessed this man to say something so stupid?!? To begin with, if violence were "incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul," then why would He command the Israelites to basically commit genocide in the OT? Don't get me wrong. I feel that the paradigm that Christ brought mandates that our justice no longer be found on earth (if it ever was), and that for the vast majority of circumstances non-violence makes the most sense. I also feel that faith should never be "spread by the sword," because what good news was ever imparted by a blade?

But to make that statement today about Islam as a whole is just ignorant. Especially given Christianity's track record when it comes to violence. Also, Islam has not sincerely attempted to spread faith by the sword since 1492. Even the fanatic crazies who are blowing themselves up are not hoping to spread Islam so much as to exorcise the earth of the "devil" that is the West (Israel as well, of course).

While I feel like comparing him to Hitler and Mussolini goes a bit far, I think that at least a clarification is in order. The Vatican tried this yesterday evening:

"It was certainly not the intention of the Holy Father to carry out an in-depth study of jihad and Muslim thinking about it, even less so to offend the sensitivity of the Muslim faithful."

So if it wasn't the Holy Pontiff's intention to carry out an in-depth study of Islam, was it his intention to carry out a cursory and horribly wrong study of it?

Happy blogaversary me.

I have felt the ruinous approach of the itch to shake the earth. I'm jonesing to write it down, to map out the steps you take to go back to the beginning and the end at once. I want to be the infinitely large room in which an infinite amount of monkeys sit at an infinity of type writers and type throughout eternity all the master works. The perfect poem; book; blog post? I want to woo readers, make them drop their lives and come and follow my writing as though messiah's face was verdana and 12 point all over the computer screen where the URL points them tellingly to my fingers. I want to part the net sea, to be the holy search hit on google when one searches for salvation. I want to die young and break so many hearts and be immortalized through city names and river names and why not a mountain range.

I preached a sermon last night where I shamelessly canabalized pieces from other sermons and highly modified them. The overall direction was my own, and I certainly added a lot of my own material, but a couple of the key illustrations were not mine. I know that if I were to ask each of the people I "borrowed" from, they would look at me funny and say that the material is not theirs but God's, and that I shouldn't think twice about it. When composing the sermon it felt good to think of it that way. But when I delivered the sermon last night, and when several people came to say "good job", "that one's a keeper", etc, I couldn't help but feel cheap about it. Have any of you that preach/teach run into this issue? If so, how have you dealt with it?

In the spirit of the "open source" preaching I seem to be espousing, here is one of the points I ended with last night. If for some reason you like it, feel free to use it:

Whenever God speaks, something incredible happens. In Genesis, when he said "Let there be light" a planet-sized ball of gas ignited in the night sky and became the light by which we see. Through Jesus Christ, God again has said "let there be light," but he's talking about us! The light on the hill, the salt of the earth.

The metal! The toys
That shake and go boom
Rip apart the room
Send children in parts
Watch them sprinkle down
Like red jimmies on the street!
Look at the shoes!
They fall off of feet.

I remember back in the day we "hackers" would buy bumper stickers that said "Free Kevin." We felt really cool for supporting the cause to expedite the release of hacker Kevin Mitnick who was supposedly thrown in jail without a trial, etc. After his release in 2000, the novelty of cutting the sticker in half and putting it in reverse so that it read "Kevin Free" wore off quickly, so I went and bought a Free Tibet sticker instead.



I'll always remember when Eralda's mom came from Albania for the first time and saw that sticker on the back of my car. "What does that say?" she asked in Albanian. "It says Free Tibet," my wife answered. Her mother smiled, "So that is the car that is going to free Tibet?" We all chuckled.

There is a campaign now called Free Derek Webb. Derek Webb, however, is not incarcerated, nor is he oppressed by a Chinese regime. Instead, he has produced and released an album which he is giving away for free. You can find it here: FreeDerekWebb.com

So who is Derek Webb? I guarantee you that my buddies Tyson Kirksey and Greg McKinzie could tell you a whole lot more than I could about him. The little I know about him is that he used to be a member of Caedman's Call until he broke off on his own and has since release several solo albums, each of which are VERY poignant (and sometimes downright confrontational) regarding the Church.

Why is he releasing a free album? According to Derek, "we hope this bold campaign will provide a jumping off point for conversations about all of these issues," namely "poverty, war, and the basic ethics by which we live and deal with others."

Go. Download. Give it a listen. After all, what do you have to lose? Nothing but hard drive space.

UPDATE: I just discovered that this album (Mockingbird) has already been released. Now all of a sudden I feel kind of bad for the folks who went out and bought the album already. Then again, maybe I feel kind of cheap for getting such good music for free. The lyrics are incredible. Poetic, and as usual, challenging.