2008
December 31, 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.
January 2, 2009 at 11:56 am
WH,
Would like to hear your thoughts on prostration. Could you say a little more?
January 3, 2009 at 1:59 am
Suraj,
I can only speak from my limited experience, and even then only stutter about this.
The practice of making prostrations has, among other things, deepened my awareness that my body has an integral role in my relationship with God. In the past, I thought of salvation almost exclusively as the salvation of my soul, as though the resurrected body would only be some kind of an appendage or shell of the soul. Paying attention to postures in prayer—prostrations being what’s most affected me, I think, and standing being the other—has gradually taught me that my body is very much a part of the “me” whom God wants to save and is in the process of saving.
Perhaps it is also the case that when man goes down on his knees and touches his head to the ground in that crouched position, occupying that small space, he cannot help but realize simultaneously how small he is, how big God is, and how great the chasm that has been bridged by the Incarnation. That, at least, is what has gradually dawned on me.
Thanks for asking this great question.
W.H.
January 14, 2009 at 4:32 am
I’ve been meaning to ask you: what have you read of Fr Behr, i.e. have you read The Road to Nicaea and/or The Nicene Faith?
January 14, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Fr. John Behr is a very recent discovery for me. I’ve only heard this interview with him on Ancient Faith Radio and read his lecture entitled “Orthodoxy” which was given at the University of North Carolina. I liked the interview so much I’ve listened to it at least 5 times! I also found the lecture a very lucid summary of Orthodoxy.
I haven’t read either of the books you mentioned although I’d like to. (Now that I’m in Malaysia and far away from a decent libraries and bookstores, it’s more difficult to lay hands on them.)