2008

In no particular order, the top 10 things I learned/realized/was told in 2008:

1. The other Dan Craig is a brilliant a musician/songwriter from Colorado and has an album called Skin Grows Thin that just came out this year. I listened to it every day while driving to work last semester.

2. If you jump on the Facebook bandwagon everybody will find you—everybody from high school classmates to students to people you’ve only met once. All 242 (and counting) of them. And you’ll even do a little friend-scouting and stalking of your own.

3. Fr. John Behr is one kick-ass historian and theologian.

4. Pablo’s on 6th on the southwest corner of 6th and Washington in Denver makes the best Americano in Colorado and the world. Believe me: I’ve moved halfway across the world and it’s TRUE.

5. The more honest you are with yourself and others, the more you can love and let yourself be loved.

6. God isn’t fooled by the masks we put on even though we ourselves are.

7. Behind the wheel, most Malaysians are functionally Darwinian. Also, they don’t believe in concepts such as “lane” and “letting other people in”. Blinker? What blinker?

8. If you tell non-Christians you’re a Christian, they’ll expect Christian behavior from you.

9. These words which a wise friend wrote me after my mom died:

Each mother, like each human being, is unique, and one’s relationship with one’s mother is necessarily unique; but I think it is true to say that the loss of one’s mother is something none of us ever really gets over, even if we were to live for 200 years. For most of us, losing one’s mother changes the way we look at life and death; it is the door through which mortality really sinks in to us for the first time. The person through whom we were brought into life succumbs to death; one’s tie to the world of the living becomes strangely ambiguous, because so great a part of oneself is no longer there. At the same time, the confrontation with the reality of death is, I suspect, part of God’s will for each one of us. The medicine is very bitter, but it is given to us out of love, in God’s will to lead us out of what we are and into what he would have us be. It is part of the painful process by which we are made fit to enter into his kingdom, a communion with him in which all that we ever lost is found again.

10. Prostrating in prayer can change the way you look at God, yourself, the world. Seriously.

Thank you

As those of you can tell who don’t read this blog only through a feed, I’ve been trying out different WordPress themes. Mostly my concern has been to find something that would be easy on your eyes and mine and at the same time allow for some freedom in formatting. I would opt for the customizable CSS option but my knowledge of programming is as good as my Hebrew, which is to say, not so much pathetic as non-existent. Anyway, I’ve decided to stick to the original theme with which this blog was started more than a year ago.

Which leads me to something far more important—a big “thank you” to you all for reading and commenting, but most of all for your prayers for me and my family, especially in the days following my mom’s death and my sudden return to Malaysia. At the time of the writing of this post, this blog has had 25,822 hits since I started it in October 2007. Many of you fellow-bloggers have helped by cross-posting and linking from your well-known blogs, and I have to thank you all especially for that.

Today Mike told me that he feels old because he fell down the stairs after giving his 3-year-old son a bath. Apparently he was distracted by the armful of “crap from bathtime” (the expression is his). Earlier this year, Mike also lost a whole year of his life because he thought he was 31 going on 32, and his wife had to remind him that he was 32 going on 33.

I hope that you all don’t fall down any stairs or feel old as you cross yet another threshold, and that you don’t lose any of the coming year from thinking you’re a year younger.

Happy New Year!

Dalam Tuhan kita Yesus Kristus,
W.H. (Ilyas)

Stutter, memory

For the first time since I’ve been home, I went grocery shopping all by myself today. I had to drive to the gigantic mall nearby because that’s where the nearest grocery store is. Don’t ask why—it’s just the way it is.

Anyway, I was looking for ingredients to make pasta carbonara (one of the 7 meals in my culinary repertoire) and had trouble finding, of all things, pasta. I finally gave up and asked a girl in a smart gray uniform and navy blue vest.  She was moving boxes that didn’t look too heavy.

“Try Aisle 10,” she replied, pointing me a few aisles down.

I looked at the sign above Aisle 10. “WESTERN FOOD,” it said in large white letters.

Funny, because everything in King Soopers and Safeway in Denver was “Western food” and it went without saying. If you wanted jasmine rice, sesame seed oil or a good curry sauce you had to go to the “Asian/Mexican food” aisle to get it.

I couldn’t find the bacon either, until I stumbled upon a small store within the bigger store with a sign at the entrance that said: “NON-HALAL”. Inside, I found all kinds of things my Muslim friends would’ve deemed abominable: pork sausages, smoked bacon, non-smoked bacon, honey-roasted ham.

The salespeople on behind the display counter of unkosher delights gave me puzzled looks when I asked them how many grams there were in a pound. I practically burned my brains out trying to translate 1 lb. of bacon into damned metric grams until one of them (an alpha female of sorts, by my reckoning) finally said politely but sternly, “You get about 3 slices for every 100 grams, but we have no idea what a pound is.” I picked up 600 grams of it because I remembered that 1 kilogram = 2.2 lbs. = 1000 grams. Or something like that.

I put the package neatly in the corner of my green basket and when I got to the real counter where I checked out all my other items, I was mindful to take the already-paid-for package of bacon out so it wouldn’t accidentally render unclean the Muslim boy sacking my groceries. Something about the whole process made me feel a bit sheepish for buying a pork product.

Later, at the barber’s near my house, I found myself staring at a picture of Ganesh while the barber, a man from India in his late 30’s, hovered a pair of unstoppable scissors and a large white comb over my head. I marvelled at his blue skin and elephant head—Ganesh’s, that is, not my barber’s—and tried to recall the story one of my Hindu students told in my World Religions class last semester about how he (Ganesh, again) lost his human head and got replaced with an elephant one instead.

My attempt at remembering was interrupted by a new thump-thump beat exploding from a small radio on the shelf. The song made me think of OneRepublic and that ubiquitous song they used to play at Rude gym off Federal Boulevard in Denver. It’s too late to apologize, it’s too laaaate…. Except it wasn’t that song exactly. Plus it was in Tamil.

Just then a man came into the shop with two small children. Conversation between him and my anonymous (to me, at least) barber took place in reams of unfurling Tamil syllables, at the end of which the man turned to his son and said, “Wait here. I have to go home and get some money.” The toddler obediently sat down and looked at my barber with some measure of awe at the unrelenting scissors still grazing off my hair at the edge of the white comb. His dad took his sister by the hand and walked out. It made me happy to live in a country where, in some places at least, you could still trust a barber to watch your kid for a bit.

Then I got to thinking what I was doing this time last year, when 2007 was coming to an end.

I remember a fantastic Christmas-octave dinner (of fish, I’m quite sure) at Brian and Sarah’s during which we finished a bottle of wine, which undoubtedly caused me to doze off while we were watching Elf afterwards. I remember the fireplace and the crackling fire that was really just their last starter log because they’d run out of real firewood. I (vaguely) remember Brian giving me a blanket to keep me warm since I was already crashed out on their couch, and I remember waking up in the middle of the night on that couch in their living room and being comforted by the warm glow of lights on the Christmas tree and a luminous moon pouring in through the east window.

I remember waking up the next morning to the smell of coffee which Sarah had made, a light breakfast afterwards, and driving home happy about this: though none of us had stayed up late enough to greet the new year (we were all in bed by 11!), I’d started it off in good company.

He met our senses half-way

The Saviour of us all, the Word of God, in His great love took to Himself a body and moved as Man among men, meeting their senses, so to speak, half way. He became Himself an object for the senses, so that those who were seeking God in sensible things might apprehend the Father through the works which He, the Word of God, did in the body. Human and human-minded as men were, therefore, to whichever side they looked in the sensible world they found themselves taught the truth. Were they awe-stricken by creation? They beheld it confessing Christ as Lord. Did their minds tend to regard men as Gods? The uniqueness of the Saviour’s works marked Him, alone of men, as Son of God. Were they drawn to evil spirits? They saw them driven out by the Lord and learned that the Word of God alone was God and that the evil spirits were not gods at all. Were they inclined to hero-worship and the cult of the dead? Then the fact that the Saviour had risen from the dead showed them how false these other deities were, and that the Word of the Father is the one true Lord, the Lord even if death. For this reason was He both born and manifested as Man, for this He died and rose, in order that, eclipsing by His works all other human deeds, He might recall men from all the paths of error to know the Father. As He says Himself, “I came to seek and to save that which was lost.”

St. Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation II.16

Of love and the beginning of redemption, about halfway through Athanasius

… [I]t was our sorry case that caused the Word to come down, our transgression that called out His love for us, so that He made haste to help us and to appear among us. It is we who were the cause of His taking human form, and for our salvation that in His great love He was both born and manifested in a human body. (St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation I.4)

I’m still making my way slowly through St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation which I’d naïvely hoped to finish before Christmas Day. So much for speed-reading Patristic texts!

What’s struck me these past few days has been how much Athanasius grounds his whole understanding of the Incarnation and redemption in God’s love. It is love that moved God to create, and it is this same love that moves Him to save. It should sound like a no-brainer, yes? Yet, as I’ve had a chance to recall and think about some of the theories and models of redemption I’ve encountered in the past, I have to say that not all of them begin with or anchored in God’s love.

Some, for example, start with God’s wrath that has been kindled by our sin and needs to be appeased by a sacrificial death (and so Christ’s instead of ours). Others begin with the premise that our sin has incurred an infinite debt against God which only God Himself can “pay”.

While these ways of speaking of redemption can certainly be found in the Bible, I don’t think they are primary. When they are not subordinated to the way which begins with God’s love they can, from personal experience, lead not only to a destructive theology but also a warped, Jansenist spirituality in which the Christian becomes perpetually obsessed with his/her own sins and the imperative to be “clean” before God. By seeing everything through the prism of divine love, however, Athanasius circumvents this joy-sucking vortex on the path of discipleship.

Another thread that I’ve picked up from my reading so far is that for St. Athanasius, redemption begins not with Jesus’ passion but with His Incarnation. He begins at the very beginning. Again, this would be nothing to write home about except for the fact that I’ve come across too many Christians who begin their thinking about redemption with Jesus’ passion and death, such that everything in the Gospels prior to that point is a sort of prologue, like previews before the movie actually begins.

My sense, however, is that the Fathers had a broader view of Christ’s saving work. For them, as for the Gospel writers, the great wheel of salvation—not only for us but for the whole creation—is set in motion by the Incarnation of the Word. From this standpoint, Jesus’ whole life is redemptive: his birth, his childhood, his “hidden life” in the Nazareth years (I recall here the spiritual praxis of Charles de Foucauld), his eating with sinners, his mighty deeds, his praying—every movement of the Word-made-Flesh redeems us, heals our wounds, and raises us up to the life of the Age to Come. That the cross and the Resurrection together form the zenith of God’s saving action in Christ does not subtract from the importance of all that preceded—or followed—it. Here is St. Irenaeus of Lyons:

For He came to save all through means of Himself—all, I say, who through Him are born again to God—infants, and children, and boys, and youths, and old men. He therefore passed through every age, becoming an infant for infants, thus sanctifying infants; a child for children, thus sanctifying those who are of this age, being at the same time made to them an example of piety, righteousness, and submission; a youth for youths, becoming an example to youths, and thus sanctifying them for the Lord. So likewise He was an old man for old men, that He might be a perfect Master for all, not merely as respects the setting forth of the truth, but also as regards age, sanctifying at the same time the aged also, and becoming an example to them likewise. Then, at last, He came on to death itself, that He might be the first-born from the dead, that in all things He might have the pre-eminence (Colossians 1.18), the Prince of life (Acts 3.15), existing before all, and going before all. (Against the Heresies 2.22.4)

This profound share in the diverse aspects of human life, it seems to me, is one of the themes in St. Athanasius’ thought as well.