The Statistics On Perseverance

Over the last week, I have been working through economist Milton Friedman's public television series, "Free To Choose." As I watched the successive programs on Google Video, I noticed that that the view count was steadily diminishing. Despite my protests to the contrary, I still very much like numbers, and I was intrigued by what I was seeing. So, I did what any reasonable mathematician would do: I organized the data and made it visual.

You can see what happened. Over ten hours, viewer interest (or viewer tenacity) declined steadily, with most of the casual viewers leaving after the first two programs. A number of viewers took a "sampling," catching Program 5 and then skipping ahead to the last couple of programs.

I noticed a similar phenomenon on a construction forum that I frequent. A particular user had posted a series of photos - links that had to be opened in new windows - documenting a finish carpentry project. Number of views was indicated next to the link...

The graphs are astonishingly similar. Steeper rates at first, followed by a more gradual decline, with that characteristic "hump" at the end.

I imagine (with a shudder) that there are many people who read books this way. There is these days too much emphasis on starts and stops; we like to emphasize the two ends. Remove the middleman, fine, but don't remove the middle. For me, things are done properly when they are done like races: start to finish.

Till We Have Faces

Slowly, stealthily, I've been sneaking away from my sparsely furnished, rigidly efficient study into the forbidden world of fiction and fantasy; like a scared little boy peering out from under his bed, hardly daring to believe that the monsters are really gone. It is a delicate transition and one that is properly made cautiously.

I started with The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis's classic treatment of heaven and hell, which I heartily recommend. Now, even the Narnia Chronicles are beckoning, a work which three years ago I would never have entertained reading.

My most recent Lewis read, Till We Have Faces, is the latest continuation of this emancipation. (Or entanglement, as it may be.) In this novel, which is subtitled, "A Myth Retold," Lewis examines the classical story of Cupid and Psyche, weaving into it Christian themes about the nature and profundity of existence.

A friend pointed me to a very useful lecture on the book by the Christian philosopher Peter Kreeft (website) who appears to be an accomplished student of Lewis. Kreeft does a fine job of laying out the deep questions of the book.

How does one reconcile Faith and Reason? Why is there such tension between Religion and Philosophy Why must holy places be dark places? Why would something - someone - that is good, choose to hide his face?

(Some of this hearkens back to a Greg Boyd lecture I mentioned some time ago: "The Temptation To Practical Goodness." If you haven't listened to this one, please do; everyone should hear this message.)

Till We Have Faces develops themes also explored in The Four Loves and The Great Divorce. It is not one of my favorites from Lewis; my main impression was that the book could be a good bit shorter and still accomplish the same things. It is, however, a very subtle work, and deserves to be reread and pondered.

I'm not going to spill the punch line. To figure out the title, you'll need to read it.


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The Latest "Catch"

I haven't been able to bring myself to put these away yet; I just like looking at them. ("The World Is Flat" is on loan from a friend. Thanks Caleb!)

Words and Worlds

During a conversation this evening, I hit upon an analogy that helps explain how the sacred and secular - the "shallow and profound" - intersect. Credit for this post goes to one of my four favorite sisters.

Our entire lives are spent learning to communicate. As toddlers, our main goals in a life are attention and apple juice, and we possess a vocabulary remarkably suited to these objectives. As we mature, we begin to take an interest in the kinetic, mechanical side of things - us boys anyhow. (Well, girls too, in their own way.) This is the time for screwdrivers and spaceships; (or noodles and needlepoint, if you prefer.)

Our vocabulary begins to grow. We learn to spell beyond four letters. Occasionally, on sultry, God-forsaken afternoons, we have writing assignments. Of course, we resent it, just as a becalmed schooner resents it when the wind begins to fill her sails.

But we keep at it, (growing up,) and the words keep coming. And they keep getting longer, and thicker. Life itself is broadening and reaching in a thousand new directions, and we find we actually need these new words desperately in order to contain these new dimensions.

And here we come to the fundamental thing: vocabularies are accrual. The long, precise words are invaluable, but we find we are still in need of all the short ones in between. Words build together, like a rubber-band ball, around the very elementary core of the language.

And so it is in spiritual things. Profundity is intoxicating, but we must not overlook the humbler ingredients of the pie. We still need the little words. Any skyscraper will tell you that the first floor is strictly essential. The view from the 40th floor is stunning, and we sometimes think we should remove the lower 39 floors because, we say, they are just weighing us down. Rubbish! They are not weighing us down. They are holding us up.

"Precept upon precept, line upon line..." The whole thing is incremental; that is the whole point. We get frustrated about the drudgery of daily life, but we forget that the flights of stairs exist for the view - indeed, for the climb. To put it in bumper-sticker terms, "Don't arrive, thrive!"

Spirituality needs the everyday. We need to be able to talk about baseball, or bologne, or even (gulp) the weather. It is an integrated, living whole, not intended to be chopped up into little pieces and sorted into colored bins.

The life that is whole has God at the center, and a center necessarily implies an outer. Oswald Chambers calls it "the full-orbed life;" most of us are about as full-orbed as a pancake.

Reading Rituals

Reading, like writing, or music, is highly subjective; not only the what, but the how. Everyone assumes their own idiosyncratic posture, breathing, and wrinkled brow. It is an intensely personal matter.

I myself have the odd conviction of running only one bookmark at a time, (excepting devotionals, or the Bible,) which in practice is both a mercy and a madness. I appreciate the discipline and thoroughness of the approach, but it does cause you to sometimes treat the book as an obstruction: an irritating inconvenience that is preventing you from moving on. This can be somewhat unhealthy. (Of course, if the book is just plain daft, I will put it down (sometimes the putting is more violent) and move on.)

I don't know if it is the quantity of my reading, or the rapidity, but I find it difficult to absorb and retain much real substance. So, to this end, I employ a number of strategies.

The first and most useful of these strategies is a fifty cent highlighter. The advantage is twofold: it helps me remain (relatively) alert, and also performs an invaluable service in making the exceptional portions of the book immediately available for later reference.

Of course, there are practical difficulties. In the car, you wind up with lines that look more like sloshing soap suds than something drawn by a serious scholar. And certain books have such a pronounced crest in the pages that it is difficult to keep the highlighter from dashing down into the crease at the end of the line.

The first streaking scar in a crisp new book is never easy. But by the time I reach the end I am humming along in a nice rhythm, patches of yellow or blue or pink appearing across the pages in chaotic choreography.

There remains, of course, the vexing question of what to highlight and what to leave alone, and certain passages present quite the dilemma. Because really, that "worth highlighting" quality is not necessarily based on any definitive standard and often proves extraordinarily elusive. Which brings us to the next strategy: the good old-fashioned dog-ear.

Dog-ears are somewhat less useful, but they have their place, as when confronted with such a quantity of spectacular material that the prospect of highlighting the mass is enough to make your palms sweaty. A dog-ear does the almost-same thing much more economically. Fold the corner of the page at a 45 degree angle, to the width of about three-quarters of an inch. Not the same as a bold splash of pink, but it works, in a pinch.

It is sometimes helpful to have a pen available; for adding appropriate scripture references, or squiggling a quick question mark. (Actually, I am afraid lest the question mark in the margin will become a trademark notation. The legacy of a cynic is rarely a positive one.)

The only remaining task, after the Afterword, is one you are all familiar with by now: the infamous blog review. Boil down the sap, bottle the syrup, and hang the pail back in the woodshed. Another spring, another preface, is arriving.

Image courtesy of cancergroup.com

Thinking About Symbolism

Throughout the last several years, I have moved increasingly away from the stiff and mathematical, which used to be my predominant life-lens, toward a more holistic ideal. Life is mathematical, yes, but it is also many other things. For a long time I missed this, and I feel that I am still only catching it in pieces.

It used to fascinate me how various ones could take the book of Daniel, for instance, and weave a watertight historic or prophetic theory, working off the almost digital nature of the material. I loved calculations. I loved remembering to account for the leap years. It was all very intoxicating.

Of course, there is value in symbolism, and there is value in the prophetic. I do not intend at all to deny either. But there is also value in perspective.

Sometimes I wonder, supposing there were three Gospels, if we would not all piously squeak: "How exquisite! Just like the Trinity!" But there are not three. There are four. It may help cast our conjectures in the proper light when we consider the might-have-beens that aren't.

Numbers have a power all their own, arising from how they signify absolute ideas. This "absoluteness" can be dangerous; it may, in extreme cases, very well lead to idolatry. Numbers have often served as the impetus behind historical "enlightenment" movements toward rationalism or reductionism, which are Biblically symbolized, unflatteringly, by the Tower of Babel. (A very valuable book in this respect is James Nickel's Mathematics: Is God Silent?)

Most of this is a reaction against my own imbalances: I am questioning these things because I have, in the past, had a strong inclination towards them. As my long-dormant appreciation for the mysterious and paradoxical unfolds, I must inevitably outgrow my juvenile love of sums and squares. Like a lizard shedding a skin, the reality remains, but the old container is no longer adequate. A sort of "reverse enlightenment," I suppose, where two plus three still makes five, but somehow it's not so important.


Image courtesy of math.missouri.edu

Emotions, Eagles, and Eternity

It is astounding to me how well our very-human nature lines up with God's very-spiritual nature. There are only two possible explanations for this. We must either write off the congruency as a cosmic coincidence, or we must warm to the wonder of being made in the very image of God.

Human emotions, as chaotic as they seem, are nevertheless rooted in spiritual reality. I was reading along in my Bible the other day, minding my own business, when I was suddenly struck by how the great themes of existence - the rush of romance, or the bravado of battle, for instance - are weighted with divine significance. Which brings us to a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma: which came first?

Is spiritual reality built like a scaffold around human emotions? Or are human emotions born on the wings of spiritual reality? I believe we know the answer, but it seems we forget.

"He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart..." (Eccl. 3:11)

"...They should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring." (Acts 17:27-28)

I owe a good portion of this idea, if not all of it, to G. K. Chesterton. His journey of faith, as presented in Orthodoxy, is a remarkable account of how a man who is honestly honest with himself will finally, joyfully, recognize and receive the truth he has been stupidly staring at for so long.

"The whole history of my Utopia has the same amusing sadness. I was always rushing out of my architectural study with plans for a new turret only to find it sitting up there in the sunlight, shining, and a thousand years old." -G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Image Books, 2001) pg. 126

Contrary to New Age thought, you do not have the truth inside you. But you do have inside you enough clues to make the truth very near. In "hunt-the-thimble" terms, you are "really hot."


Image courtesy of passageministries.org

Sunshine and Sawdust

After a moderate summer, I'm back working and having a blast. I thought I'd share some of my recent sawdust and show you a little of what I've been up to.

This is one of the two spec homes I have been working on. They are within shouting distance of one another, and are being built by the same corporation. The whole arrangement is very clean and very convenient.

The footing forms, waiting for concrete. The shrouded apparatus on the right is my cement mixer; (apparently, a finish carpenter with a cement mixer is a bit of an anomaly.)

Preliminary framing. When you're setting a hundred joist hangers, it's nice to have one of these.

I missed getting any pictures of the completed raw frame. Here is the decking going down. I run the ends wild over the seams...

...and then cut them off later for a nice, clean line.

Most of the decking down.

All of the decking down.

The view to the north. Oakhurst lies beyond the ridge.

Each post is notched and then bolted to the beam with 1/2" x 8" hex bolts.

Preparing to install the skirt boards. The skirt boards wrap the edge of the decking and help create that wonderful "finished" look.

The wild ends cut and the skirt boards applied.

Last Thursday, installing the railing. This was my first all-composite railing. In the past I have always used redwood.

The other side, around the prow.

All that remains is to install the railing cap, install a few remaining post caps, and finish screwing off the decking. I hope you enjoyed seeing the project, because this is the closest I get to "decking the halls."

The Trinity Review

This morning I read an interesting piece from the Trinity Foundation entitled "The Religious Wars of the 21st Century." Written by editor John W. Robbins, (actually taken from his 2006 book, Freedom and Capitalism,) it is a remarkable collection of history. I appreciated most of his views, both assumptions and conclusions, and will be looking further into the Foundation's material. More to come.


Image courtesy of health.state.nm.us

Writing to Learn

Writing to Learn, my second read from William Zinsser, is an intriguing overview of the role of writing in everyday education. The ideas presented, while perhaps somewhat simplistic, are nevertheless extremely important, and likely fresh news to many of us. Read on.

Most of us are used to thinking of writing as a dread duty from deep in the dark dungeons of English class. Nothing could be further from the truth. Zinsser demonstrates that writing, as a universal communication tool, is the single key capable of unlocking the vast empires of knowledge, information, and ideas.

But wait, you say, what about reading? Can't I read my way to mastery in a subject? Well, you can and you can't. Here's why: on my beloved activity/passivity scale, reading falls somewhere above television, but somewhere below writing. I know from personal experience that it is possible to be reading along happily, look up, and then not have the faintest clue where you were. Not very productive.

Writing is different. As Zinsser says, quoting from a Professor-friend of his: "Writing is an effective means of improving thinking skills because a person must mentally process ideas in order to write an explanation. Writing also improves self-esteem because mentally processed ideas then belong to the writer and not just to the teacher or the textbook author." (- Ch. 11, Writing Physics and Chemistry) Coincidentally, today's Utmost adds a sharp spiritual dimension to this point. ("If you cannot express yourself on any subject, struggle until you can...")

To summarize Zinsser's main premise in one sentence, it is that writing serves as a universal aid to clear thinking. (Hence the title of the book.) He demystifies the process, noting simply that "writing is thinking on paper," and then assigns the blame where it is due: "The hard part isn't the writing; the hard part is the thinking."

"We write to find out what we know and what we want to say. I thought of how often as a writer I had made clear to myself some subject I had previously known nothing about by just putting one sentence after another - by reasoning my way in sequential steps to its meaning. I thought of how often the act of writing even the simplest document - a letter, for instance - had clarified my half formed ideas. Writing and thinking and learning were the same process." (-Preface)

"They looked like writers - they were thinking hard and laboriously putting sentences on paper and crossing out sentences that obviously didn't express what they were thinking, perhaps because their thinking kept changing as they wrote and discovered what they really thought." (-Ch. 9, Writing Mathematics)

Zinsser divided the book into two sections. The first develops the core ideas, and the second applies these ideas to the various branches of learning. There are generous samples of "accessible literature" from a wide spectrum of disciplines, from calculus to connotation to chemistry.

The book brims with an exuberant humanism, which is hard to disparage. I'm starting to feel that the problem with humanism is not that it goes down the wrong road, but rather that it does not go far enough down the right road. Christianity is, at least in a sense, the epitome of humanism, as I have hinted at in several previous posts.

"There was no mistaking the men and women I wanted to have along on the ride. They all had the rare gift of enthusiasm. Again and again I was struck by the exuberance that these writers brought to what they were writing about. Whatever the writer and whatever the subject ... the common thread is a sense of high enjoyment, zest, and wonder. Perhaps, both in learning to write and writing to learn, they are the only ingredients that really matter." (-Preface)


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December Wallpaper

Not sure why, but I'm in the mood for something stark and somber. Besides, this is an incredible image, and it reminds me of Rich Mullins.

Glendalough, Co. Wicklow, Ireland

Image courtesy of interfacelift.com

On Ruts And Ditches

The differences between a rut and a ditch may at first seem superficial. I aim to show that they are not. A rut is an accident, an awkward inconvenience, a nag. A ditch is direct, deliberate, intended for useful work. The physical attributes point to the metaphysical differences.

When we say "stuck in a rut," we are employing a circular cliché that deplores it's own banal existence. But we know what it means, and that is the main thing. It means we are frozen in a futile exercise, making the same sad excuses and singing the same sad songs. It also means we are behind, and that is where the real trouble comes in: what really bothers us about the whole thing is not where we are but where we could be.

We often blame our ruts on our surroundings, and the accusation has some truth to it. But the mud notwithstanding, we must take responsibility for steering the car into it. The mistake, in itself, is honest enough. What is inexcusable is to sit and sulk instead of doing the common-sense thing and getting the shovel.

A ditch is another proposition altogether. The story of 2 Kings 3 demonstrates well the requirements and rewards of the chore, and has been cropping up frequently for the last while; for instance, in this fine passage from C. S. Lewis's Reflections On The Psalms:

"We are merely, as Donne says, tuning our instruments. The tuning up of the orchestra can be itself delightful, but only to those who can in some measure, however little, anticipate the symphony. The Jewish sacrifices, and even our own most sacred rites, as they actually occur in human experience, are, like the tuning, promise, not performance. Hence, like the tuning, they may have in them much duty and little delight; or none. But the duty exists for the delight. When we carry out our 'religious duties' we are like people digging channels in a waterless land, in order than when at last the water comes, it may find them ready. I mean, for the most part."

It's hard to dig ditches when we are loath to part with the dirt in our lives. But the dirt must give way to the discipline of the dredge as we carve out the depths of our depravity, clearing out the sediment, until the waters of God run through us wide and clear and cold. He bottles our tears and pours them out in joy.

You "make" a rut, through negligent habit, and "dig" a ditch, through diligent industry. Ruts just happen; ditches don't. That's the easiest way I know to tell the difference.


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Thinking About News

I'm coming off an awesome week. Here we are in downtown December, and it's been 70 degrees, deck framing, Granny Smith apples, and roast-beef/fried-egg sandwiches. Now the weekend is here, the tools are safely stowed away, and it's raining tenderly. It all makes for an endlessly delicious place to live and work.

In line with my new Green Coffee project, I've been thinking more about what makes a Christian approach (and response) to news, the media, and the general information explosion. Some see following the headlines as unhealthy; others see it as simple responsibility. I am sympathetic to both views, and will take them in order.

As I noted dryly two months ago, most news is bad news, for the simple reason that most things are bad. (Not fundamentally, but sociologically.) To have 6.5 billion people stranded in space on a big blue ball, all thinking about themselves, does not incline one to optimism. And every day we see the fallout, the trail of tears, the collective wreckage that we make of collective existence.

So the news is often - inevitably - depressing. And to the extent that it distracts us from the standards of Philippians 4:8, it should be avoided. (Becoming entangled in idle, old-fashioned Athenian-style gossip is another danger.) But to the extent that we are selfishly insulating ourselves from the uncomfortable, I feel our aloofness could be questioned.

Based on Jeremiah 29:7 and 1 Timothy 2:1-2, we understand that we are to pray for society as a whole, as well as for specific leaders. This is key. To intercede, we must be informed; to be informed, we must be interested.

We do not desire to advance a Christian political agenda. But it is only fair that we jump in, get our hands dirty, and wrestle along with everyone else with the tough questions, instead of pretending that they don't exist, which is not a very useful answer. It does no good to claim that we are somehow above the grimy issues of existence, when the world knows that is just a smokescreen for laziness. Snobbery is the bane of spirituality.

This is likely an area where Anabaptists and Reconstructionists can learn from each other. The Amish and the Religious Right have similar problems for opposite reasons.


Image courtesy of simentra.com

Enviable Employment

I think if I wasn't in construction I would have a doughnut shop. The benefits are numerous.

• Early hours. All bright and chipper at 6 while the rest of the citizenry is stumbling in half asleep.
• Instant news. Keep close tabs on the pulse of your community. Those old guys must be talking about something.
• Free afternoons. Perfect for reading or sweeping the porch, whichever needs doing.
  
• Dietary benefits. Continual access to fresh, first-quality doughnuts.

Image courtesy of moccasin-coffee.de

Curvy Roads

Lately Jesse and I have been biking up our road together on a somewhat regular basis. It's only about 4 miles, but it's a pretty good workout.

Today, toiling along at 7 miles an hour, I was thinking about how nice it is that the road is broken up into short twists that allow you to focus on the task at hand - riding - without having to mentally tackle the whole route. It would be unbearably intimidating to face the entire 4 miles in a straight, strong line, reaching up into the distance as far as you can see.

There is a common fallacy regarding the shortest distance between two points, and I am as guilty as anyone of going along with it. The truth is, were we to be confronted with our future in the form of a titanic to-do list, most of us would promptly faint.

That's why God does not generally spread the map out on the table like we often want Him to. He requires us simply to trust, and "do the next thing." The twin sins of pride and procrastination make this plenty challenging: so often we scurry about worrying our petty selves over this or that when we really just need to brush our teeth and go to bed.

Nearly everything about life is incremental and repetitive; eating a meal in bites, taking a walk in steps, singing a song in notes, even breathing. I believe the Lord wants us to break things down and enter the mystery we commonly call the moment. As C. S. Lewis said, "The Present is the point at which time touches eternity." (There is an excellent examination of the distinctly Christian nature of the moment in ch. XV of The Screwtape Letters.)

So thank the Lord for curvy roads, and realize that step-by-step is not confining; step-by-step is survival.


Image courtesy of livinginoneness.com

Cream and Sugar?

I've had a growing urge to disseminate some of the miscellaneous interesting information that I pick up around the web, but the last thing I want to do is turn Sojourner's Song into a news heap. So, to resolve the dilemma I launched a simple aggregator blog - probably not amounting to much more than an RSS feed - that will host the shallow, colorful nonsense that doesn't belong in a serious blog. It just helps to maintain a sense of place and a semblance of order, kind of like the "No Wal-Marts in San Diego" idea.

See you at the grind.