When fighting and death exercise their wild dominion around us, then we are called to bear witness to God’s love and God’s peace not only by word and thought, but also by our deeds. Read James 4:1-12! We should daily ask ourselves where we can bear witness in what we do to the kingdom in which love and peace prevail. The great peace for which we long can only grow again from peace between twos and threes. Let us put an end to all hate, mistrust, envy, disquiet, wherever we can. “Blessed are the pacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.”

~Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A Testament to Freedom

• 
  A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

James 4

Submit Yourselves to God

1What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? 2You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. 3When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.

4You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. 5Or do you think Scripture says without reason that the spirit he caused to live in us envies intensely?[a] 6But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says:
“God opposes the proud
but gives grace to the humble.”[b]

7Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.

11Brothers, do not slander one another. Anyone who speaks against his brother or judges him speaks against the law and judges it. When you judge the law, you are not keeping it, but sitting in judgment on it. 12There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the one who is able to save and destroy. But you—who are you to judge your neighbor?

~James 4:1-12

• What causes fights and quarrels among you?
• Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you?
• You want something but don’t get it.

It’s hard to own up to, but its true… most of the strife and contention in my life is of my own doing. On some internal plane of hyperactive-reasoning and contemplation, I create all the worries and concerns of the imaginary tomorrow. All this anxiety has to come out somewhere, unfortunately this “somewhere” is oftentimes within the relationships that should be characterized by love and peace.

Family in-fighting, friendship strife, community squabbles, city divisions, political venom, world wide paranoia…

…what could be the antidote to such evils?


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Categories: C.S. Lewis, Judgement, Peace, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Advice, Books, Art, Criticisms
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No Christian and, indeed , no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as “what a man does with his solitude.” It was one of the Wesley’s I think, who said that the New Testament knows nothing of solitary religion. We are forbidden to neglect the assembling of ourselves together. Christianity is already institutional in the earliest of its documents. The Church is the Bride of Christ. We are members of one another.

In our own age the idea that religion belongs to our private life–that it is, in fact, an occupation for the individual’s hour of leisure–is at once paradoxical, dangerous, and natural. It is paradoxical because this exaltation of the individual in the religious field springs up in an age when collectivism is ruthlessly defeating the individual in every other field…There is a crowd of busybodies, self-appointed masters of ceremonies, whose life is devoted to destroying solitude wherever solitude still exists. They call it “taking the young people out of themselves,” or “waking them up,” or “overcoming their apathy.” If an Augustine, a Vaughan, A Traherne, or a Wordsworth should be born in the modern world, the leaders of a youth organization would soon cure him. If a really good home, such as the home of Alcinous and Arete in the Odyssey or the Rostovs in War and Peace or any of the Charlotte M. Yonge’s families, existed today, it would be denounced as bourgeois and every engine of destruction would be leveled against it. And even where the planners fail and someone is left physically by himself, the wireless has seen to it that he will be–in a sense not intended by Scipio–never less alone than when alone. We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude , silence, privacy, and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

~C.S. Lewis; The Weight of Glory, Membership

• 
  The Weight of Glory
  Author: C. S. Lewis

I found this trailing quip about the “wireless” a prophetic vision by Lewis. I would contend that it is currently impossible for us to appreciate to what extent mobile communications are changing the nature of our relationships to each other, our immediate environment, and in this case ourselves. With the mantras of technology, advertising, and networking… we are never allowed to be alone.


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Categories: Solitude, Distraction, C.S. Lewis, Advice, Books
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The truth of a thing, then, is the blossom of it, the thing it is made for, the topmost stone set on with rejoicing; truth in a man’s imagination is the power to recognize this truth of a thing.

But far higher will the doing of the least, the most insignificant, duty raise him.

These relations are facts of man’s nature… He is so constituted as to understand them at first more than he can love them, with the resulting advantage of having thereby the opportunity of choosing them purely because they are true: so doing he chooses to love them, and is enabled to love them in the doing, which alone can truly reveal them to him and make the loving of them possible. Then they cease to show themselves in the form of duties and appear as they more truly are, absolute truths, essential realities, eternal delights. The man is a true man who chooses duty; he is a perfect man who at length never thinks of duty, who forgets the name of it.

~George MacDonald, Truth of Things, Caution, Duties

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

I believe this man and his old wisdom have a fair amount of good work to do in bridging the perceived gap between ardently conservative truth seekers and whimsically honest post modern existentialists.

There are deeper realities that all humans must admit to as part of the defining character of what it means to be human… and at the same time, these realities can only be known by living out our lives with rich personally subjective context.

I find it quite ironic that the existential cure for post modern anxiety would be nothing less than duty… and the final blossom of submitting to such duty may be an absolute truth that could be appreciated along side all fellow humans; to know and be known.

Some words will continually need rescue from shallow history; truth, duty, responsibility, perfection, love, nature…

Categories: Truth, Duty, Advice, George MacDonald, Books
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Haven’t you figured it out
There’s a world outside of Hollywood
A world outside the Bright Lights
the Glamor
That Blinds everyone, Forces Jealousy
to their sight

Don’t forget, You’re Hollywood
You mask your pain with Beauty
With the complex Lyrics, the illusive poetry
Their beauty Lies beyond even your sight

That’s what you are, You’re Hollywood
You’re the Factory of all the movies
the hope of all the people who live, who thrive
off pretending to live a life you’ll never live
to blind the world to see what you’ll never be

I once was Hollywood, but that didn’t last
and for that I am Glad
I no longer need to Hide the mysteries, the complexities
that dwell within my being

Never Again Will I be Hollywood or Admire
its beauty and bright Lights
For I would Rather be
Lost, Alone, in a city strange
than Surrounded by a world of Fakes

~unknown poet, found April 2006 Henry Ford Estates

I do a fairly regular bike ride down Hines drive and occasionally I will dip in behind the Henry Ford estate on the east end to hang out for a contemplative moment with the waterfall.

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About 4 years ago I stopped in there when the water was especially low, I think there was a bunch of debris damning it up. Anyway, the stepping stones that usually have a water cascade on top had become visible and dry.

Someone had inscribed the above poem on one of the stones.

It felt like a message just for me.

At that time I was in the moment of trying to begin everything that was an indie film career, well I still am… but anyway, it hit me like this transcendent little drop of what I would normally consider quite conventional wisdom… worthy of a nod of agreement, but perhaps nothing more.

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Somehow the poetic format and the first person tone brought me in touch with this cliche truth in a profound way.

This endeavor… telling stories through a visual medium, film making…

… well, it has a long history of eating people up and dehumanizing them in an especially brutal way.

Bight Lights, Glamor, and Forced Jealousy… was that what I was going to end up creating? Is that what Detroit was courting with the film industry?

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To be sure, I have met dozens of the most generous and kind people I know through the local indie film groups in Detroit… in many ways it is these people that I fell in love with when I started down this path and entered into this world of would be film making.

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I still have no idea what the future holds for the success of my film making aspirations, but I do hope that myself, my community, and all of Detroit can take this trite message to heart and see beyond the beauty that is within our sight.

I am hopeful that such personal injury to one’s soul is not inherent to the medium of film or the story telling process, and perhaps it can be done while leaving Hollywood behind…

Categories: Hollywood, Advice, Poetry, Challenges, Film Making
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IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And - which is more - you’ll be a Man, my son!

~Rudyard Kipling, If…

Categories: Advice, Poetry
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I no longer hesitated what to do. I resolved to lash myself securely to the water cask upon which I now held, to cut it loose from the counter, and to throw myself with it into the water. I attracted my brother’s attention by signs, pointed to the floating barrels that came near us, and did everything in my power to make him understand what I was about to do. I thought at length that he comprehended my design - but, whether this was the case or not, he shook his head despairingly, and refused to move from his station by the ring-bolt. It was impossible to reach him; the emergency admitted of no delay ; and so, with a bitter struggle, I resigned him to his fate, fastened myself to the cask by means of the lashings which secured it to the counter, and precipitated myself with it into the sea, without another moment’s hesitation.

~Edgar Allan Poe, A Descent into the Maelstrom

• 
  Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales and Poems
  Author: Edgar Allan Poe

Categories: Seafaring, Advice, Poetry, Books
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The worst images are of people who are overloaded with information, they don’t know what to do with it, and have no idea of what is important… they become information junkies.

~Neil Postman

• What is the problem that a technology seeks to solve?
• Who’s problem is it?
• What new problems does the technological solution create?

Neil Postman, our future problems…

Categories: Advice, Technology
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Do not let yourself be governed by it, especially not in unproductive moments. In productive ones try to make use of it as one more means of seizing life. Used purely, it is itself pure, and one need not be ashamed of it; and when you feel too familiar with it, when you fee the growing intimacy with it, then turn towards great and serious subjects, before which it will become small and helpless. Seek for the depth of things: there irony never descends–and when you have thus brought it to the edge of greatness, test at the same time whether this mode of perception springs from a necessity or your being. For under the influence of serious things it will either fall away from you (if it is something non-essential), or else it will (if it belongs to you innately) with gathering strength become a serious tool and be ranked among the means by which you will have to form your art.

~Rainer Maria Rilke

• 
  Letters to a Young Poet
  Author: Franz Xaver Kappus

Categories: Rilke, Irony, Advice, Books
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Dear friend,

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

~Rainer Maria Rilke

Delivered by a neighborhood friend at just the right time.

Categories: Advice, Poetry, Neighbors
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