The Evantine Abbey

Not New but Valuable Nonetheless

2010-10-22T11:09:00.000-07:00

I know we are due for a "Fifth Edition" but this still sells well.

My wife is a great cook. Everyone says so and science has declared me fat on every axis of measure. So you need her cookbook (seen to the left).
It costs $25.
The link to our sales site is on the sidebar (BigHausLoot).
Buy one. Heck, if your listening to me at all, buy twenty. Takes care of all your Christmas shopping at once.

I shouldn't be telling you this but what is cool is that I can make these puppies at home. This allows a profit margin unseen in the days when I made them at Kinkos. I got me a Ricoh Aficio SP C410dn color laser printer which makes all the notebooks and products of Big Haus easy to knock out on demand.

I got it from the guys at http://www.laserprintercenter.com/
While the color is phenomenal, it is the duplexing that almost makes me weep. Weep, of course, in a manly, tearless way.

Of Elizabeth Catherine Wilson (nee Dodds) On Her Deathbed

2010-09-17T10:13:00.000-07:00

My mother is now 91. And she is dying soon, in a matter of weeks. Nothing is wrong with her besides being old. Things are shutting down. She has wished this, going to be with the Lord, for decades. Not because life in our family is rotten and the escape of death the only hope, but for all the joy and blessing life has been for we Wilsons, it is "not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed."

While she is looking forward to an elevation beyond our knowledge, we will be left behind to elevate her memory. Her service to the Kingdom of God, her years of supporting my father as he served the Kingdom of God, and her guidance of we four, then whom we married, our offspring and the generation of great grandchildren (like rabbits) below them. She has run the race and is ready. She taught us to run it and we are ready for her to be done. She and Father taught us well that we are running "toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus." And as she dies, our belief and joy in what she taught invests our conversation.

I thought I would post the poem I wrote for her 7oth birthday party at which I threatened her with another 10 years of life. She felt it as a threat, spoke to me (her favorite child) sternly, but nonetheless proceeded to cruise through 21 more.

To his mother on her seventieth birthday

I've known her four and thirty years today
With my mem'ry faint in events mundane;
But still, like a history studied, stays
On times. I do remember things of fame—
Not `line on line' and `precept' unto death—
But those momentous, far from commonplace,
And will not accept any trivial breath
To darken my creation. A pale face,
Still set in British dour kindness, I have
Shining in my mind. Not because of good,
Though much, to others shown. I am a slave
To position, marveling at rank as would
Angels. On high they sang of her, I heard,
Sang to me, “Queen Elizabeth the Third”.

by Evan Wilson

Simply Put

2010-07-30T15:26:00.001-07:00

It is Simple.

For whatever peace you seek, establish order in that realm.
Before this...
To order that realm, acknowledge the need for governance.
And yet...
To know whose government it is, doubt your means of knowing.
Until now...
Your habits were your order.
They are not a means of knowing.
Your movements came from passions.
They are neither ordered nor a means of knowing.
The chaos that you made called for tyrants,
by their intent or yours,
by accident or by desperation.
What remains...
Your reason may read from
the revelation of the God,
(for He would know, would He not?)
and the reality that He made
(for that is what must be ordered).

What did they say?
Do you believe what was said?
Will you be governed?

Such is the Tao.
Let chaos chase the fool.

Royal Purple

2010-07-19T14:11:00.000-07:00

Proverbs 31:21 She is not afraid of snow for her household,
for all her household are clothed in scarlet.

Women have a natural sense of jeopardy when subject to threats, and from threats arise fears. It is natural that institutions such as society, marriage and the church offer a degree of security regarding those threats. But it is not only these others that should sustain a woman from her fears. Her own efforts, doing what it takes to provide the “scarlet” clothes that are adequate to warm, have removed her fears. Were a woman to not rise to make this sort of contribution, she might think that her lack of provision highlights her husband's securing influence, thus she might revel in the romance of being a little “princess”. A woman’s fear can have a pervasive effect on her household, children especially. But her own work at resolving the threats she can, ameliorates those fears in her and in them. If she has cast all tasks back on her husband, her fears don’t necessarily vanish. Men have a way of being less than omnipotent. Her temptation (instead of a goodwife's resolve) is to turn her fears into frets which has its voice in nagging. A goodwife is the source of some part of the family's security and is certainly praiseworthy.

Proverbs 31:22 She makes herself coverings;
her clothing is fine linen and purple.

In the beating back of primal and survival fears, a goodwife runs up the score. Not only is her family warm, but she also takes care of her own appearance, and that in a rewarding fashion (pun intended). Whatever the economic level of a family, the wife should know that one of her tasks is the bedecking of herself as well as she can afford. God made women decorative and each should have the will and way to honor that intention. To some extent the new patriarchy/home school culture has drawn up a vision (stereotypes are not always true but are recognizable nonetheless) of some harmless drudge that, hopefully, no one notices. Just as her modesty of clothing ought not threaten the intimacy of the vow made to her husband, her fashion should enjoy the level and merit she inhabits in society. We will not have the Queen dressing like a charwoman. Dress with the glory you have earned. Advertise the glory of a goodwife.

"A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver."

2010-07-15T17:14:00.000-07:00

My golden daughter bought a new car, a Honda Fit.

Fitly

A "helper fit" for more, this fitly was
And "fitly spoken" were its words and ways.
No "fits of rage" (when foaming fit undoes),
Could fit these new wayfaring days.

by Evan Wilson

"Your Handmaid is but a Servant to Wash the Feet of the Servants of my Lord."

2010-07-12T16:49:00.000-07:00

Proverbs 31:20 She opens her hand to the poor, and reaches out her hands to the needy.

There are some "domestic accomplishment" wives who are not “Goodwives”. These women are just “can do” personalities—choleric fascists who work like Hercules cleaning out the Augean Stables. So far, so good. But (a crucial "but") they will have an ordered household that is in service not to husband, family or guests, but is a temple to which all those must come and worship, removing their shoes in obeisance. All others than herself must not benefit, relax, consume, wear-out, dirty the thing that she has made. I have seen plastic on the furniture. I have heard of rooms banned from family life.

Although verse 20 is not about domestic affairs, it measures the distinction between a good wife's ordered home and this other order. It is a reminder that when our hearts are in service they will choose to serve either others or ourselves. When the heart is in service to a husband and not in service to a private, unshared peace, that heart goes naturally to others as well, outsiders who have not. The goodwife's house is already an article of “service” to those who share that home and her wide reaching capabilities allow that heart to serve the needy. The productive “self-server” finds her own wants closer to her heart and can never find residual time or material to give.

Now it is also possible that a wife would be out and about serving the poor and fail to accomplish the first tier of her responsibility. The verse is not alone and has been preceded by her first calling, that of wife of a husband and potentially a mother of her children. Should a woman want to be in dominant service to the needy, then she should remain single that the calling of "lover of the home, husband and children" (from Titus) would not be an untouched arena of failure, but a reasonable avoidance of precedent claims. But if you marry, the heart that serves God first, and under such the husband second, will find herself eager to be doing good deeds beyond the home.

I Corinthians 7:34 And the unmarried woman or girl is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit; but the married woman is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please her husband.

"Spinning wheel got to go round"

2010-07-09T14:27:00.000-07:00

Proverbs 31:19 She puts her hands to the distaff, and her hands hold the spindle.

Spinning thread and weaving used to be a most basic task for women in keeping their households in clothes, tents, and rugs. This, thankfully, is no longer necessary. The principle, however, is the need for maintenance of mundane goods and conditions. Since you are on a computer reading this, you are probably middle-class, as am I. We are close enough to subsistence level that there are many tasks in a home which our lack of domestic staff leaves to us. With or without servants there are those domestic duties which need hands-on arrangement. Somebody has to do it. If the wife is at home (and I don't think she must be) the delegation of those mundanities has fallen to her. It is just like the husband's regular use of the car to go to work delegates the automotive maintenance to him. Because we do not have many layers of service below us, all of us need attend to slavish seeming actions to keep our ship-of-home afloat.

The Proverbial goodwife has already “sought the wool and flax” (v. 13), and her hands are taking this "bottom" of society's provisions, tedious as these can be, through to completion. This means remembering to buy toilet paper and aspirin, getting the stain out of junior’s pants, and wiping the counter once again.

I know that some gentle readers are asking themselves, "Can't her husband wipe something, for crying out loud?" Of course he can, just as she can fill the tank with gas on occasion. "Lighten up Francis." I even mentioned servants. I could have added children and a helpful husband without even a grimace of distaste. But the passage isn't talking about helpful husbands. It is talking about what a woman should consider about herself that she might be considered a goodwife. Does it suggest it or not? If it does, do you believe it? You have heard the standard, believed the standard, and are seeking to apply the standard. Let God judge the inconsiderate husband.

Profitess (Not a Misspelling)

2010-07-06T10:47:00.000-07:00

Proverbs 31:18
She perceives that her merchandise is profitable. Her lamp does not go out at night.

A wise woman is farsighted into the future of her household because she has observed the value of her past efforts. Her good sense sees not only the accomplishment of a task but the potential profit in the inventory of things she produces. While some goodwives actually make a product (be it food, art, clothing, etc.) whose retail value is measure in dollars, all goodwives allow their work to be a profit. Each husband of such women see their fief increase through the creativity of their wife. The reputation of the family, the grace of the home, and the husbands standing as a man is being made by his wife's recognition that she is building a wide array of profit. All this collects as a value in her mind, be she making curtains, cookies, or the good will of her guests and family. It is not drudgery and “make work” for the little woman to keep her set aside in the harem. She sees a pile of wealth that sprang from her hands, and although she got up earlier than everyone else, she is reluctant to let another day end while she could still profit her husband. She is certainly, as goodwife, a "helper fit" for the kingdom her husband builds, and all the while, as she makes her contribution to his gain, the strength she gave returns to her as a more secure world.

The Big Haus Diet and Workout

2010-06-28T10:42:00.000-07:00

She girds her loins with strength and makes her arms strong.
Proverbs 31:17

There are women who are sluggards. I have been to homes in which a reasonably educated woman spent a whole day, thank you, but in which I feared for my health. I didn't want to touch anything. I didn't want to eat anything. It wasn't her gracious hospitality that kept me there. It was my gracious Christianity. And the Black Hole of Calcutta that was the living room wasn't because of a lack of money. It was a lack of busy.

A sluggard is not merely a poor excuse for humanity beset with the "lazies", but will be, by natural laws, unhealthy. Women all over the Western World are hoping for and attempting to gain a utopia of casual, pointless T.V. lives with intermittent shopping, tramp stamp, and a small dog. And they wonder why they have to consider their diets and go to the gym. The Proverbial goodwife life is an investment in the goodwife’s body. Women naturally know that they are an object of man’s aesthetic appreciation. A woman who longs to serve her husband with an ordered, clean, and beautiful fief is also benefited by the collateral fruit of a stronger physique. I say "stronger" rather than "thin" because that is what the text above says. I also know larger women who work hard in their homes and it keeps them strong and attractive people. It is the blobs who are repellent and their homes are the matching ecosystem.

My own, The Amazing Missus, is a cleaning, cooking, hostessing machine of an 8000 square foot home under the weight of 52 years of my old friend Futility. No gym. No special diets.

Behold!

"It Is Good to be Quoted" E. Bruce Wilson

2010-06-18T11:09:00.000-07:00

In Quotes

To say what better men before me would;
To spring alive to lips and heard, adored
Though made of timely words, they timeless stood.
I battle on to say that which rewards.

I’ve rattled on a bit but wonders skirt
My verbage, as if muses heard me speak,
And while not inclined to kiss, they flirt
With waning wit, with promises too weak.

So I will prattle on, while hopes surround
Each lofty thought spun wisely sweet and bright,
To blend my fitted terms on depth profound.
At last in quotes, not yet, but might tonight.

by Evan Wilson

A Capital Wife

2010-06-16T12:10:00.000-07:00

Proverbs 31:15
She rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household
and tasks for her maidens.

When a goodwife concludes that she serves in her husband's fief, there are collateral tasks revealed. It is often the case that her work must precede his in time of day, that her service should be underway before those that she serves, and even those that serve her, can address their obligations. The attitudes surrounding the “inconvenience” is hopefully moderated by the willingness and trustworthiness already attained. One of the worms this early bird gets is that she gets to set the pace and the agenda for the day (spiritually and materially) by coming to thoughtful conclusions in early diligence. Remember that her "husband doth trust in her", and her efforts are for him and his. The day’s pace, attitude, and the tasks placed on the agenda by her effort will be natural to the ends that the ruler of the fief has desired for it.

And this women is not a shortsighted, bleary-eyed drudge, dragging her tired, fuzzy slippered resentments to the coffee maker so that the beached sea lion still sleeping above stairs can not face one tiny bit of inconvenience on his descent. Such a minimalist doesn't want to be a goodwife, she just wants a tiny bit of evidence to throw in the face of accusations that she isn't. The goodwife extends herself with profit for the fief in view. Her wisdom spends money and labor to purchase long term benefits. She can then invest what she built up to make even more. She does not look at the household budget as a zero sum game with only “x” dollars and “y” demands on them. A profitable viewpoint is not constrained to the money her lord allots her, but can take that money, that time, that food, and any material profit and apply it all to future gains. It is often that a kingdom's greatest imperial expansions are provided by the hard, constant efforts of the grand vizier.

Proverbs 31:16
She considers a field and buys it;
with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard.

To Emily: On Goals

2010-06-11T11:50:00.000-07:00

My Future Plans

Our going needs no reason’d argument
As dragg’d are we before the certain past
Into the unframe’d hopes ahead, where went
We all, with every soul from first to last.

With scatter’d infinite of maybes, yet
We draft a plan with single math precise
In all its vision, now of then, a bet
Against the House, before we roll the dice.

Our gambling boasts of such presumption, weak,
(Though God and chance and time and rot forbid!)
That we ignore realities that speak
Of stronger bets on what tomorrow did.

So since I can not hope to rule the next,
And if my God permits my presence there,
T’will be by wisdom how my peace effects
Whatever come, whatever will and where.

by Evan Wilson

Now We're Cookin' With Gas

2010-06-07T11:25:00.000-07:00

She is like the ships of the merchant, she brings her food from afar.
Proverbs 31-14

We see a metaphor for a Goodwife's cooking abilities in international trade. The point of the metaphor is not in the financial aspect of trade deficits or a declining dollar, but in the range and breadth of her food provision capabilities. Out of a net spread wide come rewards, passed through her selection and efforts, in what she puts on the table. While nobody wants nor expects that every day's menu must be replete with arcane food groups, the Goodwife's menu shall not be limited to a pedestrian “hamburger helper” and a rotation of the easiest, most accessible items. We must realize that nobody thinks (like the family in the commercial seems to), that the woman whose cookies came mixed, sliced, and on a ready-to-bake pan is going to any effort, past foisting on the unemancipated offspring her mundane self-absorption. “Let’s all pretend that I cook and please credit me with a reputation!” These are called "convenience foods" for a reason. If a box of Stouffer's Lasagna is pulled out of the freezer because you just returned from a vacation and you have no time to do anything else, God bless it for being convenient. If your life needs a stockpile of convenience foods because every moment of that life is playing "Real Housewives from Whatever God Forsaken Culdesac You Live In" or you can't be bothered to learn how to cook because you like reading romance novels, the convenience it provides has been demanded by your world-without-end inadequacy.

Is “world merchant” the metaphor for your kitchen? Or would it be, “Mom, you are as intriguing as, Oh, I dunno,... as tap water.”

Tub Time

2010-06-02T10:25:00.001-07:00

Just thinking. Well, I was soaking in the tub and thinking. What was I thinking about? I was thinking about wives who have complaints about their husbands. They hear the admonition from the Apostle to respect these men and either throw the impertinent Apostle over the side of "Her Majesty's Ship Amazonia" or look at the attempt through narrowed gaze wondering how they shall honor their husbands when said husband is such a fool. They want to have a husband they could respect but the command did not include a special dispensation to disrespect those men that have not risen sufficiently in the wife's esteem. The husband's faults, seen clearly by fifty percent of the population, are that he has not seen fit to look and love like Antonio Banderas, think and write like St. C.S. of Lewis, and work like an AnteBellum slave. Some of these more religious women make the attempt to "honor" the pond scum that fathered her children with fake noises of reverence. This is a wide spread problem and my tub was expending all its porcelain force to resolve it.

There is a basic error here. It is presumed by the modern that the Bible tells a wife to respect something that is not respectable. Maybe the Bible is not sufficiently up-to-date. Maybe modernity is filled with stupid people. Maybe husbands, masters, and emperors are better human beings then the average wife, slave, or citizen. Maybe the universe is not just astronomical distance but is also cosmological height. Maybe in a universe infested with height, it requires faith in height (and height alone with no admixture of your egalitarian nonsense, thank you) to live Biblically at all. "But," you say (feeling your every-waking-hour-bitchiness being torn away from your french-manicured claws), "does not he have these faults?" Yes, Einstein, he does but this is about your faults, your disobedience, and your excuse making. Just sayin'. Maybe.

This is what the difference is between an licit observation and an illicit complaint. Superiors are in charge of correcting their inferiors. Seems like this is a basic task reserved for the superior. And observation of fault becomes bitchy complaining when an inferior doesn't think anything odd of correcting "uphill". They don't even believe in the "hill". Your observation of fault will blend with your definition of who you are in the relationship. Are you less, are you a peer, or are you better? Change your notion of what a husband is.

So once the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves and were submissive to their husbands, as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord. And you are now her children if you do right and let nothing terrify you.
I Peter 3:5-6

And if you don't keep thinking that you rule just as much as he, you will find that your husband's manifest errors remain observable but entrusted to agents higher than yourself to discipline. You can rest. You can reverence. You can respect.

You already know this. You already agree with me. Answer me this, should children be expected to honor a mother regardless of her outbursts, her moods, her inconsistencies, her mistakes, her outright uniformed judgments, and her lack of style (yep, really, just deal with it)? You and I think they should. I have a reason. You are just selfish.

"If you see in a province the poor oppressed and justice and right violently taken away, do not be amazed at the matter; for the high official is watched by a higher, and there are yet higher ones over them."

Ecclesiastes 5:8

Quiet Descends

2010-05-28T10:01:00.000-07:00

O goddess sing, whose wane and fall has come,

Of He above who reigns and made thee thus.
Thy beauties born were borne by man that from
Their supplicance they got more life from dust.

Cry down the gods for He has surely said,
"Thy time is o'er and given to My Son!"
What crowns divine fall from thy brows and heads
To pass from night to this, the day of only One?

The stone we graved in passing likeness of
And trees the same (we raised and bowed to less)
Were made for more, from naught but thought above
And did declare to those who hear, a rest.

But certain silence walks behind my tongue;
Though words, high words, had tumbled out before
Of gods' romance, of having been that once.
But this, O God! The God, my God! Adore!

by Evan Wilson

Trust and Get Gain

2010-05-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain.
Proverbs 31:11

When someone or something is trusted, a certain release of control is delegated to the thing or person trusted. “I trust a chair,” means that I intend to give up supporting myself by my legs, and delegate that effort to the legs of the chair. If I trust my wife it means I find her able to take over the areas I delegate to her, and in those areas, since I hope to gain from life, I will gain in her efforts. It is the center (“heart”, as in heart of the tree) of the husband that relinquishes control of areas of their life together. A “Goodwife” is not one who makes her husband concerned or suspicious of her abilities. No one likes to be in the chair that gives cause for suspicion. To avoid embarrassment, you start to tuck your legs under you, in case the chair fails. What then is the point of the chair?

Good Mornin', Goodwife!

2010-05-18T11:00:00.000-07:00

Proverbs 31:10
A good wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels.

A “goodwife”, tragically, is a rarity. When you have read all of Proverbs 31 it should be obvious why. It is almost as rare as righteousness. The comparison to the precious rarity of jewels is multifaceted (ow!). Besides rare, they, second only to a "baby-in-the-room", gain a woman’s attention.

Jewels, it should be noted, are not valuable intrinsically. They are made precious when the market declares and we believe them to be a valuable item, like cash money. These retain their value as long as the market believes them to be worth something. How far has the average Christian woman fallen from this description in Proverbs? How much time is wasted making excuses, or denigrating either Solomon or the Word of God? How easy is it to sell men on you by just adjusting cup size, eyelash length, or “suggestion”? Who needs to work so hard?

Proverbs 6:25
Do not desire her beauty in your heart,
and do not let her capture you with her eyelashes;

Husbands often behave badly. Wives do no less. If your looks and your leisure are the measure of your success as a woman, you may be, at best, a precious and prize cow. You have filled out the herd of many thousand head that wanders the malls of this land. And no, that wasn’t a “jewel” you left behind nor did your husband “rise up and call you blessed” for having left it steaming in his life on your way to lunch with your spray-tanned friends.

On Sexy Time

2010-05-11T10:30:00.000-07:00

If husband and wife are going to govern their marriage together they have to jointly know what is going on. Alone, each tends to project their own views of what sex is about. We think, incorrectly, that our physical reactions and emotions are the same.

The men say, “We want sex, dang it!” and the women say, “Us too... sometimes.”
And here we have liftoff into our problem.

Proverbs 5
15 Drink water from your own cistern, flowing water from your own well.
16 Should your springs be scattered abroad, streams of water in the streets?
17 Let them be for yourself alone, and not for strangers with you.
18 Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth,
19 a lovely hind, a graceful doe. Let her affection fill you at all times with delight,
be infatuated always with her love.
20 Why should you be infatuated, my son,
with a loose woman and embrace the bosom of an adventuress?

There! See?
Hey wife! I got a verse!
In the Bible we are supposed to want her all the time.
And we do. Our work here is done.

But what is it that we are desiring “all the time”? Men think it is the tingling they feel in their naughty bits, (the big stupids).

Genesis 2
23 Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man." 24 Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. 25 And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.

This is the Mojo (and Evan is its prophet).
This is the magic passed down to every man (discounting the eunuchs). The act of sex, which we seem to want just like animals, is not merely an act desired for the physical satisfaction. We share that with the animals. The human and moral desire of man is for rapprochement, the rejoining of that which was previously separated. Sex is a metaphor in which we enact this desire. God gives us pleasure in it physically, but the closer we approach the sensation of reunion, the higher and more intense the act becomes.

We see it in all the insecurities, or even perversions, men encounter. There are the endless commercials and huge market for male enhancement products. Enlarging a man is less demanded by a woman, but for the man it grants an emotional sensation of his greater rapprochement. And then there are men who dress up in women’s clothes or want to be surgically made into “women”. From size insecurities to perversions, man wants to enter woman from every angle and with great frequency. For the married, the wife is the “target” of their never-fully-achieved rapprochement. Thankfully, God in his wisdom has given us the solaces of orgasm, marriage and children. Orgasm punctuates the attempt, marriage allows continuance of the attempt, and children are a victory in the attempt, as the child “is” in a sense the successful combination of the two people.

A Little More "Shut the Heck Up."

2010-05-10T09:59:00.000-07:00

Those who tell a future story based on prophesy is trying to match the vision to a narrative, yes, but their narrative is, by definition, a fiction. The latitude of fiction is that I can make anything happen and it can bear a wonderful similarity to the vision it promises to “fulfill”. These Bible teachers think that in this God is glorified. God is only glorified in His having accomplished (in history) a story which followed a preexistent vision to the prophet describing the same. God is not glorified by us creating a fictional accomplishment and believing it strongly. They have tried to glorify when they should hope. Any false prophet has the same latitude if he can craft both a prophesy and write book after book on how it will be fulfilled.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
Romans 8:22-25

The Gravity of Being a Christian

2010-05-07T14:13:00.000-07:00

So you go to a believing church. They confirm to you the great truths of the Faith. But you really wish your Christian life was more "real" and was more successful. Depending on your emotional frame you seek out a spiritual function that will excite you because it seems to you that an excited Christian is a good Christian. Some ministries will offer you the heaviest back-beat this side of Aerosmith while some tweak you emotionally giddy with the magick of Latin. There is nothing wrong with having a back-beat in church nor is there something wrong with Latin. What is wrong is the "cart-before-the-horse" error of crafting an excitement in a religious circumstance and telling yourself you are on the road to the deep things of Jesus.

What am I suggesting? Christianity is not by Faith lived in excitement, it is by Faith lived in deeds. Feel free to be excited (and you very well may be) after your "have done all that is commanded."

"Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith. "
James 2:18

"Every one who comes to me and hears my words and does them, I will show you what he is like: he is like a man building a house, who dug deep, and laid the foundation upon rock; and when a flood arose, the stream broke against that house, and could not shake it, because it had been well built."
Luke 6:47-48

Head faith becomes heart faith, not when you "feel it deeply", but when your see the world before you in no other way. Christians have problems because their head faith is in Jesus but their heart, their center, is in submission to other claims about reality. The emotional church moment works you up into a state of "willfully suspending your disbelief" in those other claims and just as in the movie theater, you judge the movie (church) by just how well your heart and center ignore the reality of your actual beliefs about life outside. Such it temporary and you keep going back to get the jolt.

You have heart faith in gravity. You never run through a catechism before your take a step. You practice no apologetics for sitting on a couch. You certainly would claim 32 feet per second squared if asked but that is not gravity to you. Gravity for you is to look out your eyes, move with your limbs, plan you every day never doubting that 32 feet per second squared is the way the world is made. Do I need to develop an emotionally mystic fit to keep gravity true (most of the time)? I would seriously worry about such a man.

So if you claim Jesus as Lord and you wish that you did what He told you, you may wish to depose all your other little gods of self and society and consider viewing the world no other way.

"Why do you call me `Lord, Lord,' and not do what I tell you? Luke 6:46

Of Kings, for those That are Not

2010-05-04T10:53:00.000-07:00

It is self-evident that our government governs our neighbor, not just ourselves. Any society has need for a law above us each. This is the economy of government. We can say, in some crude form, a government is pyramidic by necessity. If a man arbitrates between two; he governs them. And when a general directs the many agencies of his army to battle; he governs. These pyramids (where the base effected is broader in number than that which affects) are essential admissions in the theory of rule. The importance of your rule is defined by the numeric breadth of people you are above. The quality of your rule is in the economy of your pyramid.
When pyramids first were built in the 3rd dynasty of Egypt, the experiments, though necessary, failed to reach the Wonder of the World perfection of the Great Pyramids of Giza (4th Dynasty). Pharaoh Djoser managed by his undeniably brilliant seer/architect Imhotep to erect a step pyramid. The shifts between the levels was stark and sudden, like the ziggurats in Babylonia. The Pharaoh Snefru shot for the stars, almost literally, in that the pitch of his pyramid (as begun) would have thrown the pinnacle into impossible heights. The inevitable decision was to change the angle of the sides midway up and Snefru is remembered by the barn roof in the desert. To rule well, the difficulties of the crude pyramid must be shaped and stacked to define the idea of government more clearly and to have it function more efficiently. As in the words of Jethro;

“Moreover choose able men from all the people, such as fear God, men who are trustworthy and who hate a bribe; and place such men over the people as rulers of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties , and of tens. And let them judge the people at all times..”
Exodus 18:21

The clearer the pyramid, the more efficient the government. Absence of graduated delegation is foolish and tragic but to completely remove the pyramid will provide your brief society with the joys of, “And every man did what was right in his own eyes”. Good, perhaps, for Ron Paul but not for the sane.

An aristocracy/oligarchy considers that a plateau is as good as a mountain but loses the rule that they, the aristos, need as a mini-society themselves. A democracy/polity does not even rise above the plain. Their rulers are themselves. They have delegated up, not down, so that they do not bow to the definition of rule. It looks to be a pyramid but the peaks or plateaus at the top always feel the rule of the constituency, the mob. Democracy organizes its rebellions into scheduled overthrows. And we wonder why modern democracies wander further and further away from God. They can’t absorb the concept of an agent whose rule was not up to them and at their permission. And why do parents, clinging grimly to the monarchy of the home, sound so petty, angry, and impotent. Wisdom is lost with forms other than the strict pyramid. These shifts, they say to avoid tyranny, are in reality to avoid government and its benefits to the ruled.

“When you see in a province the poor oppressed and justice and right violently taken away, do not be amazed at the matter; for the high official is watched by a higher, and there are yet higher ones over them. But in all, a king is an advantage to a land with cultivated fields.”
Ecclesiastes 5:8-9

The Art of Marriage

2010-05-03T13:05:00.000-07:00

Proverbs 24
3 By wisdom a house is built,
and by understanding it is established;
4 by knowledge the rooms are filled
with all precious and pleasant riches.

Enjoying life “with the wife that you love” is your lot in that futility you call your marriage. Be advised that a married couple can and often do differ from each other and from other couples in their complexity of eye and understanding. This will make homes different from each other in how artfully humane the home’s environs become.

Certainly there are some dear Christians whose vision of life is that of an engineer or a mathematician. Their homes will be, if godly, always neat, and it will look like someone works there as “a lover of the home”. Since the “desire of the eyes” is a vanity and not intrinsic to holiness it ought never supplant the love we have for God or be a standard of judgment by which we assess another Christian’s walk. If both parties to the marriage are artless, then the accidentally Bauhaus living room and abhorrent color schemes chosen will have no negative effect on “sustaining a socially avowed sexual relationship” nor on the holiness of their hearts. Such lives can be tranquil, when both can’t cook, if neither can taste the food.

But many people do have a degree of taste, and hope that life will become more beautiful than it was. That means that there can be the temptation of divergent levels between the spouses. How often has the wife been the most moved to “art”, but the least equipped? How frustrated is a man going to become when he has to live with “cute” decisions? And how tempted can a woman become when her husband can’t (or won’t) wear a tie that matches anything within a hundred yards?

Civilization is the increase in the intricacy of a culture’s order. Affluent civilizations increase in the realms of art. But many men think that civilization is an attack on their manhood. They have considered that the raw demands of life should be met in aggressively raw form (therefore the manly form). Women don’t make it easy by trying to define the “civilized” as delicate and passive. It is as if you have a party and you want the theme to be “bunnies” and you ask the poor sap to die cut rabbits and flowers out of paper bags and put them by your driveway with tea lights for the whole world to witness and bewail. Imagine his pleasure, ladies, when he asks what will be the theme of your next party, and you say “Ragnarok. Could you build me some heavy iron, flaming tripods to go out by the driveway?”

Women, it is possible that a thinking and artful man, while shopping with you at Bed, Banal, and Beyond, could suggest (hold on to your seats, ladies) that, given the intimate nature of the bedroom, satin is preferable to canvas as a bedspread. And maybe a watercolor landscape would be nice instead of the Spinal Tap poster he had framed with plastic while in college.

This is a decades long arena of joint government of your marriage. Art is an objective communion between the Other and the Self entering sensually but enjoyed mentally. Within a marriage each party must remember their duty to the sense and enjoyment of the other. The husband serves his wife as a member of himself by considering her “eye” and her enjoyments. The wife serves her husband as head of herself by submitting to his “eye” and his enjoyments.

Proverbs 31
11 The heart of her husband trusts in her,
and he will have no lack of gain.
12 She does him good, and not harm,
all the days of her life.

Song of Solomon 3
9 King Solomon made himself a palanquin from the wood of Lebanon. 10 He made its posts of silver, its back of gold, its seat of purple; it was lovingly wrought within by the daughters of Jerusalem.

When Husbands Revere Christ...

2010-04-27T10:16:00.000-07:00

C. S. Lewis suggested aptly in his Four Loves that a Christan husband is wearing two crowns. His reverence for Christ means that, like Christ, he gives himself up for her. He wears a crown of thorns. The other crown is in that which touches both their erotic and mundane affairs. It is a paper crown.

The crown of thorns is found in the array of service that a man offers to his family. It is his actual husbandry, (as in farming) of his fief and (like all farmers) he will work like a dog to maintain the physical health and defense of all he surveys. Most wives fail to object to this crown being worn by husbands. It is the paper crown that chafes.

Obviously there are those sorts of harridans who marry some schmuck and tyrannize his days. There are also those who think that marriage is fifty-fifty which only works in agreement and can't work otherwise. Of course these women have an odd notion that somehow the disagreement should have a default setting (to resolve the fifty-fifty problem) which makes a gentleman grant the female her way. So in this "equitable" marriage they either agree or the woman is in charge. Biblical, it is not. "Hell on Wheels" is what it is called by professionals. What about the "Biblical" family who hasn't wandered off into Emergent-church land, voted for Obama, recycled, or worn a helmet while bike riding? They ofttimes go to a Bible preaching church, and know that submission to husbands is the Bible way. And yet...and yet... some of those homes are shopping for the wheels to which they will strap their living hell.

These Christian, conservative couples err when they see submission in marriage as something that touches on the MOST IMPORTANT THINGS. That is right, I said this is a mistake. It is a widely held opinion that a wife needs to accept the dictates of her husband regarding Ideas: theology, politics, philosophy. The problem is, Ideas ought not be assented to in obedience without agreement. An Idea becomes a mere Position held like the patriotism of a mercenary. Ideas cannot function as truth claims based on the non-epistemic demand of some theology martinet with a rod up his butt. If he can’t convince the woman who loves him of the truth of his ideas, then I suspect he has a lousy defense for them. He should encourage her to resist his arguments lest he be deceived by her easy acquiescence and proceed to humiliate himself in public. Her loving demand for better proofs is a humbling protection of egotistical man.

This is where a knowledge of the paper crown comes in. These higher things have their own crowns. The husband, as husband alone, is not given that crown of epistemic certainty. God bless you both if the husband can also wear those crowns effectively in a family. But to do so he must appeal to the epistemic realms (not his husbandry); the revelation of God, the law of Reason, and the evidence of Reality. The wife, for her submission to BIG ideas, must look only to those authorities.

So a wife, when she looks at her husband, sees only a lord over the mundanities. She has another lord for her morality and her philosophy. See to it that she submits to each in the correct area. Too often, a wife with some docility never questions the family theology or philosophy. She considers herself a submissive wife thereby, even though she feels a certain freedom to adjust or outright disregard the “little” things her husband asks her to do. This woman is, in fact, the least submissive of them all. Her larger thoughts should have submitted to God, Reason, and Reality. She instead, just defaulted to whatever her husband’s opinions were. And where she was supposed to submit, frying him some eggs when he asked, she did not. I am convinced that men would rather be married to someone who joyfully performed every mundane task requested, but disagreed on theology. Many women who disregard their husbands in the small are also disregarding real authority in the larger thought realm.

Husbandry has a natural and God-given crown, that of service.

Luke 22
24 A dispute also arose among them, which of them was to be regarded as the greatest. 25 And he said to them, "The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and those in authority over them are called benefactors. 26 But not so with you; rather let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves.

In reverencing Christ the kind of submission a husband offers will be different then what his wife offers. The Ephesians passage lets us know that the husband’s reverence is that to membership. A wife's is that to headship. You husbands submit yourselves to caring for the needs of your body (like Christ did for His) and give yourself up (like Christ did for you).

Take, as evidence for where you are, the reaction you have had thus far. If the topic was about the other sex than that to which you belong, was your heart and thought going “I hope he/she is listening!” Are you ready to govern this government the correct way, or not?

Or, you might not think you have this problem, but for some reason the topic annoys you anyway. If it comes up in a discussion, do you find that you make lists of where it would NOT apply and you wouldn’t have to submit yourself to each other? Wouldn’t it be better to find the way to have joy in the submission, and make your lists center on your positive opportunities?

When we say that the wife is to submit out of reverence, we mean that her reverence for Christ makes her conscious of her head rather than her membership. She IS a member but sees and reveres the Head. Her husband IS the head but sees and reveres the member. The husband images Christ out of his religious reverence and the wife images the church out of her religious reverence. In claiming Christianity your marriage will be always be the "lazy man's guide to enlightenment" regarding your claim. You haven't worn the crown of Christ, O husband, but that of a tyrant, demanding service not serving. You overstepped. Some of you (most of you actually, in this age of geldings) have accepted the post of eunuch within the be-pillowed harem where your wife, not you, holds sway. What a bit of Gawd-Help-Us! And you wives! Define what it is you are doing toward your husband and declare with me that this is what you wish Everyman to know and desire the church to be in reverence to Christ. Wouldn't it be great if the Church acted like.. um... you don't? If that is too big a thought just ask your children to apply your standards of submission and attitude to any command or request you make of them. Do you desire admiration, joy and immediacy from the little blighters? "Do unto others as you would be done by", saith the Lord.

Is the rhetoric piled on too thick? I apologize. Simply put to husbands, Christ is not a bastard nor is He a eunuch so take responsibility for how you represent Him. Simply put to wives, are you acting like the Elect Lady for whom Christ died and delivered from sin and fear? What has your marriage said about the Christian faith. If you reverence Christ, this will matter.

Feminists and patriarchal martinets are declaring a different religion.

Titus 2
4 and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, 5 to be sensible, chaste, domestic, kind, and submissive to their husbands, that the word of God may not be discredited.

Who's In Charge Here?

2010-04-26T11:33:00.000-07:00

This is the worst part of modern Christian marriage. It is the hardest to bring up and speak of, even in Christian circumstances. The men cringe, suspecting that their easily annoyed, unthinking wife will let them know, shortly after this message is completed, how she, the Great She, does not agree with Evan or the Apostle Paul. And if you ever hope to have sex again, you might want to think twice before you choose to obey Jesus before her.

Merely approaching this subject is the governing of governments, and it is a topic for the big boys and the big girls. This is not a topic for wusses (who are willing to almost cut “it” off for the privilege of only occasionally using “it”), nor is this the topic for women who think marriage is a clique in Junior High, to the top of which they rise by manipulation, rejection and favors.

How do “we” approach the question in marriage of who obeys whom? Should we jump right in on the “wives be subject” verses? No, we gotta clear something up first.

At the beginning of the “dark passage” in Ephesians there is a verse to which the feminists cling and over which the conservatives skip.

I’m conservative, and I want to look at that passage. I want it to be THE passage by which we find ourselves governing the governments of marriage with tranquil happiness. So there! I don't think that St. Paul inadvertantly let slip an idea which trumped everything he was about to say regarding wives submitting. It is an idea of "how" he wants you to agree with what he is about to say regarding wives submitting. If you don't agree with what he is about to say, you don't have what it says in this verse.

Ephesians 5
21 Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Are you religious? If so, then you claim to revere. Something or someone is the object of your reverence. It has crossed my mind that the Christian unwillingness to be what the Apostle ordered later in the chapter (both men and women) was due to the impossibility of adopting such goodness and order without settling the religion question first.

Are you having trouble guiding your wife in holiness and love? Are you having trouble obeying your husband, let alone even wrapping your mind around just saying the phrase “obeying your husband”?

I suggest that your religion is wrong. Somehow you got into a place where you don’t reverence Christ, but you have a nice picture of the “church” reverencing Christ, and you go to church. Aren’t you nice.

Until you adjust to the idea of having a god, your governance of the marriage is going be some combination of the occasional marriage seminar, a Christian self-help book and all the the worldliness you can still allow.

How have you missed it? It could be that He has simply become the character called “God” in the narrative myth which tells a story about things you don’t find that important. Or you may be an emotionally disturbed woman who dearly clings to a “fuzzy warmth” with devotion and piety but it is there to serve you rather than vice versa. And there is the deeper walk club, which can manage to not love their wives or obey their husbands, even though they have a Tolkien fan level of interest in the “correct”schematic definition of the Whole Counsel of God. It could be something else, but it seems, from the passage we are stressing, that my and your reverence for Christ is the backbone, the inertia of wonderfully accepting the following instructions with joy. If you don’t joyfully follow, you can’t point to a reverence to Christ that isn’t somehow distant from Him.

Hebrews 10
31 It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

My Pretty, My Precious

2010-04-21T14:54:00.000-07:00

This last weekend The Amazing Missus and I drove to the Town of Hip and there forgathered with the one female descendant of Clan MacEvan.

And the bark was in bloom.

Complete Faith

2010-04-20T10:19:00.000-07:00

I watched an attempt to gain more "heart" faith out of a congregation this last weekend. The assumption the pastor was making was a natural one, if flawed by the spirit of the age. The assent to a certain propositional truth is considered "head" faith and we have all witnessed both individuals and churches die in the swamp of "head" faith correctness. The spirit of the age suggests, with all of it postmodern subjectivism and its merely animal grasp of decision making, that for the heart to be engaged, the emotions regarding the truth claim need be engaged. "I believe in the Bible" becomes "YES! I KNOW (slight sob) That Jesus wrote the VERY words of LIFE! Glory!" (the latter preferably shouted). This is the St Valentines approach to the heart. In our society we consider the heart the seat of the emotions. In the Scriptures there is the sense of the center of a thing is its heart.

"Head" faith becomes "heart" faith when the truth claim made replaces the preexisting truth claims by which your life was run. In other words you look out your eyes with TRUTH A being held like Gravity is held in your next step. You don't think about it nor gauge its effectiveness. Your "head" faith must do more work than mere catechizing. It must discover and delete the earlier operating system.

Romans 10:8-10 But what does it say? The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart (that is, the word of faith which we preach); because, if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved.

If in your heart you are still Lord, (or your mother, or your church, or the Age, or your habits) don't try to replace absence of "heart" with a more stringent "head" faith. But more to our topic, don't try to solve "heart" absence by exuberant sermons or worship-fully played background strummings by the soul patch wearing worship team leader. This sort of faux-heart faith is having a few beers too many and being convinced by your church that you are SOOOOOO in love with Jesus that for a couple of days you will forget you are really married to someone else.

Some will say that I (as usual) am stressing the head aspect. They would be correct. It isn't that we think too much about the Faith but that we think too little. We only ask that superficial assent be made as far as statements of the orthodox faith. There are inside us "head" conclusions we persist affirming. There are outright, contrary to the Scriptures, pure American, family-valued other "faiths" that you really have in your "heart". Like gravity, you can't imagine them not being true. They have to go if you want Jesus to be Lord in your heart.

What the Church recommends: 1) Assent to Truth A and for the deeper walk, 2) get really emotional about it.
What I recommend: 1) Convinced of A, root out all of its competition for your guiding thoughts. 2) Feel good about it.

Emotion answers what is. Do not depend on it to cause what should be.

Pay Attention

2010-04-12T15:35:00.000-07:00

Marriages are funny on TV. Nothing like a stupid wife (like on I Love Lucy) for a laugh. Nothing like a stupid husband (on every other show) for even more laughs. We laugh because it is someone else. When it is in our relationship we want to cry.

I have seen marriages break up for this cause. I have seen wives outstrip their husbands in their interest in deeper things. Those husbands counted on the universally acknowledged fact that there is something manly about not knowing stuff.

I Samuel 25
3 Now the name of the man was Nabal [ed. the name means “fool”], and the name of his wife Ab'igail. The woman was of good understanding and beautiful, but the man was churlish and ill-behaved; he was a Calebite.

I have seen husbands living with the hell of the unteachable wife. Not that the woman is not bright. In some cases she is really smart, just uninterested in knowing or understanding. She uses her smarts to build what matters just to her.

Proverbs 11
22 Like a gold ring in a swine's snout
is a beautiful woman without discretion.

What would I recommend? A couple that mutually considers what they each retain from life’s observation will 1) find each other more interesting and 2) sidestep folly (since it lurks in ignorance) and 3) make gains in their standing in the broader community when their knowledge come to benefit others. As an extra, 4) the couple becomes better friends.

Each of these shore up a marriage. When you are not interesting to each other, when folly makes you both look stupid with some regularity, and when 20 years leaves you with no reputation worth remarking on, the word "tranquil" is replaced by the word "dull". Those closest to you, your spouse and your children, will think you dull first. Dull parents do not inspire the children to adopt the methods or beliefs of those parents. Dull Spouses may find that their partners will walk away because they have found another person, someone with a pulse. Or they may just want to get away from the room you are in before you revisit that limited inventory of ideas, or stories, or questions that you have used for years as your talking points.

If you seek to be tranquil and want it to be obviously not dull, realize that what you retain as knowledge in life will have at least four qualities.
1] the quality of the thing known.
2] the quality of that thing's known effect.
3] the quality of 1 and 2 relationship, in other words, why known and why efficacious.
4] the quality of increase.

Proverbs 4:7
The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom,
and whatever you get, get insight.

For Philip and Patrick with abjectness and downcastness of visage

2010-04-09T12:59:00.000-07:00

When an incorrect rationale seems to move you it is, many times, the illusion your passions provide to make you seem thoughtful. My father always said there is a difference between a reason and an excuse. Passions, if they move you, need an excuse. You know they do. It is evidence that we all understand that there is a correctness about the human animal that is moved by reason and principle. Why else would we provide faux reasons after the fact?

Love Losing or Losing Love

2009-11-25T09:28:00.000-08:00

There is competition both formal and informal. In it all we are asking a question. It is "Who wins and why?" The very word "competition" announces to us our mutual interest in that which may be had by only one. Nations compete for territory and tribute. Corporations for trade routes and profits. And individuals for that brief whiff of social standing, the definition of the Self.

Games are great for the exercise of the latter. Point totals, rules and limited times and terrain all compound to make the winner able to cash in a quantifiable for his or her Self definition. Ah, yes, the winner. It is always the winner, darn his hide! But the loser, the sulky, angry, excuse-making, "second place is never good enough", sort of loser is a unacceptable problem to the spirit of grace incumbent on Christians. I guess they just did not like the answer to the question expressed earlier.

Who wins? The other guy.
Why? He was better than you.
What is your problem with that? You are not wise.

"First you call me a loser and then a fool?
You are not making friends, O Oracle. "

What else should I call you?

You are playing a game. You anticipate being able to win. The point totals at the end would verify your self assessment. You rise from the table torqued, affronted, and pouty. The point totals said other than what you anticipated. They rebuked your false definition of self and to pout is to be a fool. Rejoice for you have been reproved in a false notion of yourself. Love them who beat you, for they are your teacher. For do not the Scriptures say:

Proverbs 9:8 Do not reprove a scoffer, or he will hate you;
reprove a wise man, and he will love you.
9 Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be still wiser;
teach a righteous man and he will increase in learning.

and
17:10 A rebuke goes deeper into a man of understanding
than a hundred blows into a fool.

My Humiliation

2009-11-03T10:04:00.000-08:00

And so it came to pass that Ian Tracy, resident of the court and child to Darel and Karla, count and countess of Eagle and the South, did profess with gun and repeated ventures to the woodlands to kill something larger than a hedgehog. As the days of such venture increased in number, so did the mocking words of the Marquis of Mojo. He didst rail on the young man. In his humor, he offered to bow down to young Tracy if any blood be spilt. The days and nights of seeking continued apace. The Marquis words were forgotten except when another opportunity to joke at the lad's expense arose.

Then, one night, as the court sat robustly feasting on goodly victuals, the young Nimrod stood in the door. His hands dripped with the blood o f his prey. He pointed at the Marquis whose heart turned to stone within him. Courtiers and ladies in dumbstuck silence paraded their crushed overlord into the street . The weight of his vow pushed him to his knees and he did homage to the killer of stags and young women's hearts.

The moral of the story: It is better that you not vow, than vow and not pay.

Now is your Chance....

2009-10-27T10:48:00.001-07:00

The Tao

2009-09-29T10:23:00.001-07:00

On Saturday, October 24, 2009
at the Big Haus
325 N. Polk, Moscow, Idaho
beginning at 10:00 a.m.

Cost: $50 per person
for single or married women

Contact for PDF registration brochure:
ewilson@turbonet.com

This seminar is an event that provides both the substance and enjoyment of the strengths that God has given women. It is a day of information (five talks on the Biblical structure of the Christian lady) topped off with a delightful dinner and fellowship.
We hope for a lighthearted and thoughtful day in which the social, spiritual, and mental tasks for the Christian lady are pursued. You will probably hear things you don’t want to hear but you will suspect that you needed to hear them.
Each session is taught by Mr. Evan Wilson. (Yep, he’s a guy.) Mr. Wilson is the pastor of All Souls Christian Church, philosopher in his own mind and a frustrated artist who, over many years of discussion and practical counsel, has developed a systematic on the strength and dignity that is the Christian lady.
The cost is $50, which covers the classes, a notebook with essential documents, a light lunch, coffee breaks, dinner, and least importantly, a Certificate of Achievement. The seminar is limited in size, so prompt registration is encouraged. It is for women only (married or unmarried) who have reached a time where understanding these things is needful.
We cannot promise to make you a lady, or guarantee that you will understand men, but we will deliver a philosophy that will leave you without the excuse, “No one ever told me”.
And our motto is:
“It’s the Thought that Counts.”

Seminar Schedule: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
First Session: St. SOPHIA & THE ADVENTURESS
Wisdom and Folly are personified as women in the first 9 chapters of Proverbs.
Men are instructed to seek the one and avoid the other.
Which, Wisdom or Folly, is incarnated in you?
light lunch
Second Session: THE MARRIAGE OF THE MOJO AND THE MAID
What is the desire of men all about, and how should a Christian woman deal with it?
From dating to modesty to marriage, a knowledge of Reality informs the Maid
on which way she should go.
30 minute break
Third Session: THE DAUGHTERS OF SARAH
To accept the Biblical instruction for women, a woman must come to grips with the
nature of hierarchy and the demands of honor. The issue of security and fear finds
God’s gift of a husband understood properly and with satisfaction.
30 minute break
Fourth Session: THE WAY OF A LADY
This is an effort to “gentle our condition”, by suggesting less of what to do and more of how to think. The claim is that the Fifteen Rules are true within all societies, practicable regardless of any economy, and sufficiently corrective at any time in history. Be she a Hottentot or a Hohenstaufen, the gentled philosophette will be guided to successfully fill the current culture’s task requirements by the guide of her considered philosophic vantage.
30 minute break
Fifth Session: STRENGTH & DIGNITY
Proverbs 31 describes a rather muscular domesticity. This last session
looks at what qualities a young woman should obtain to be called “the Blessed”.
1 hour break
Dinner— 7:00
perhaps a reading of the short story
“The Father of All Courtship”
Attire: Casual

FIN — 10 p.m.

Contact for PDF registration brochure:
ewilson@turbonet.com

But Mentally Add One More Citizen to Evanistan

2009-09-03T12:51:00.000-07:00

Hail to the Beauteous
Manisha Wilson!

also
pic by
Helen Schiebe

Unto To All I Survey

2009-09-03T12:40:00.001-07:00

With the moment of Empire upon me,
The Legions would cry out in acclaim,
If I stood at the center of power,
But I went home alone once again.

(pause for a sublime sensation of lost causes)

And Helen Schiebe took a picture.

Of a New(ark) York Wedding

2009-08-31T14:20:00.000-07:00

31

2009-08-12T10:35:00.000-07:00

So the Amazing Missus and I have trod the rosy fields of bliss, lo, these 31 years today. It has not been all hand holding and baby talk but an insightful dissection of our happiness so that others would not be forced to guess.
What am I saying?
Keep your calendar free for November 6-7, 2009.
It is open to singles as well.

For Your Use

2009-08-06T17:31:00.000-07:00

"It is good to be quoted."

Evan Bruce Wilson

Is this True?

2009-07-17T08:41:00.000-07:00

Order is better than disorder.
Order within the Overorder is better that order without.
He who is able to order is better than he who can't.
And he who comprehends the functional relationship of his order and the Overorder, that man, he is a saint.

"Think about it, then pop off." John Barry

I Apologize

2009-07-04T14:46:00.000-07:00

I am a loyal American citizen. I have served in our country's military. I like hot dogs and fireworks with the usual middle-aged verve of the chunkier portions of my generation. I put my hand over my heart at the appropriate occasions. So, on this day, this Fourth of July, I pass on one other aspect of acute, if Cassandra-like, mental precision.

We were wrong.
George the III was right and was the Lord's anointed.

So in the spirit of a Democrat Congress apologizing for the perfidy of others, I apologize to Her Majesty, Elizabeth the II for my country's sins.

I am perhaps alone in the metaphoric rending of garment. Mayhap it be only I for whom the potato salad turns to ashes upon consumption. But it is also I alone who will stand with eyes narrowed as the Great Unwashed gyrates through their patriotic fit.

I am loyal to America as she is, as I live in her. So it is of now I celebrate America thankful for the order and protection she provides.
Celebrate her founding? Pshaw!
I am big on King Solomon. Not so big on the adultery and murder that brought his mom and dad together.

Society for Classical Learning Conference

2009-07-01T09:22:00.000-07:00

I been gone, just me, alone.
Gone away to San Antone.
"But, baby, baby," I moanin' phone,
"It's hot as sin. I'm comin' home."

Parents: A Five Ton Dumb Truck Filled with Ten Pound Sacks of Stupid

2009-06-05T09:49:00.000-07:00

If all men seek peace, all men will notice those that have it. He who has it, Peace not merely placidity, has it for cause. Does he know the cause and did he craft, design, submit to, or recognize that cause? Could he communicate it to the curious among the rest of man? The rest all want that which he has and he both understands and can convey what brought his peace to be. The rest will learn from him and will follow in his Way.
Peace will be caused by an applied order and the quality and nature of the Peace will be the quality and nature of the order.
Peace with God means you have ordered, reconciled, ceased to rebel in your life before God. Domestic peace means the home (its schedule, furniture, cleanliness, etc) is in order. Relational peace means that your nearest and dearest have ordered their expression of relational emotion.
In whatever kind of peace men seek they will consider very seriously that kind of order that the peaceful example of such recommends.

In other words...
Your children, O Christian parent, want a Peace and have ample time to perceive it in you. If you have it, Peace not merely placidity, do you know why and can you communicate that why? If they want to be like you (does anyone want to be like you?), they will want to know and they will follow.

(As an aside: they don't want denominational/orthodox peace first and foremost so don't base the home order on catechizing. They need to see you satisfied by the Love of God, obedient by grace not Law, loving your neighbor as yourself, living by reason not passion).

But more than likely...
If you are not at peace, you are either boring (placid without cause) or a collection of chaotic moments. Who (since all men want peace) wishes to follow either example? In the dull they can't spot any cause which is transferable other than a commitment to abject soullessness run through a word generator of Christian terms and trends. In the chaotic parent, they, the children already have what you have, thank you very much. You live by impulse and passion and so do they. If you want them to "turn out" ought you not "turn out" first? Who would wish to believe that which you claim to believe when you cannot show that it caused any peace in you?

You are dull and thankfully can't blame Jesus or you are "swayed by various impulse" none of which produce peace or an understanding of the ordered life.

This is the answer to every parental concern.
When your "Jesus" didn't fix you, why would your children hope in Him.

The Lieutenants at Big Haus

2009-05-07T13:25:00.001-07:00

At the Big Haus we have had tenants for almost thirty years. Our ministry has been to introduce them to the Christian mind on any subject that came up. These tenants got only an ad hoc experience but it seemed to bear fruit for the Kingdom of Heaven. This multi-decade commitment convinced us we might know what we were doing and it encouraged us to shape the ministry more consciously. This last year we added the role of a Big Haus lieutenancy. Our supporters endowed two rooms which we can offer to people, (rent free but they pay for food), who come to go through a structured program covering the most influential things that have shaped our own thought. This last year Andrew Knecht spent two semesters here and Travis Schnider one semester. I've asked them to write up a general impression. This post is what Andrew provided and Travis' will be posted when it arrives.

Andrew Knecht

The Big Haus offered a wonderful opportunity to me this past year. The Lieutenancy program offered through the Big Haus Society blessed me in many facets of my life. Mr. Evan Wilson's reading curriculum covered a wide area of topics from which to choose any number of discussion points, from education to metaphysical beings, the purpose and place for humor to a life in the Holy Spirit, from the dilemmas of espionage to what women and men really want. Each author provided aspects to better understand the Big Haus way of life, one of peace and understanding. Discussions both formally with Evan and around the house generally encouraged honing of my ideas and development of my philosophy. And although I was provided with Evan's theories on each subject, self-assurance and truth-seeking were the goal in all talks. The lifestyle of the Big Haus propagates love, honor and hospitality.

Through the Big Haus Lieutenancy, seeing and understanding how and why Evan and Leslie Wilson live as they do, I am seeking more fervently a life in tune with God's Word and Truth. I gained tools and ideas to catapult my thought to deeper and more practical areas. I enjoyed great authors and found others to read in the future. I ate like a king and praised God for the hospitality I and others enjoyed. I thank God for giving me the circumstance to grow and mature.

"A tranquil mind gives life to the flesh, but passion makes the bones rot."

Proverbs 14:30

The Oracle again:

We have just started a young lady named Kensington Baines on the program and we have one other open spot for a person whose interests match what we provide.

If you know anyone who might be interested in such, check us out here.

An application is here.

If you would like to share in supporting this work, our contacts are available at this link.

I am the Soul of Passion

2009-04-17T09:31:00.000-07:00

I Peter 1:14-16 As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; since it is written, "You shall be holy, for I am holy."

Passions. This is what moves you, gives you cause for the various effects you encounter when you are stupid. Yep, that's it folks. If you don't have a reason or habit for doing something (and reasons can be assessed and habits trained) you will use your passion for doing something. Then your life become "Stupid on Parade." The removal of ignorance is a great antidote for passionate foolishness. Have you ever wondered why, with all your religious protestations, you still sin like a fraternity brother? Try thinking about your life rather than waiting for Jesus to show up like a buxom blond.

Don't get me wrong. I am a fan of passion, at least those that involve the desires of the flesh and the eyes. Why seem I to be bashing them? I am not. I am entering your life today to suggest that you reposition passion. Heretofore you have used it as a cause. It has gotten you into sin, folly and dumb decisions. Occasionally it is positive, but trust me, that was only accidental. I would suggest that you place passion as "effect" rather than "cause", the punctuation of the sensible sentence of your life, thought, and wise/holy choices. Let wisdom and holiness take a wife for you "not in the passion of lust like the heathen who do not know God." Enjoy this well selected wife passionately. Let good sex be an effect of a good choice and good ideas. Pursuing your fleshy passions as a cause gets you a few nights of steam and a subsequent life of hell. Make up your mind first. A mind made up is examinable. Talking to the drunken ramblings of the passionately driven is not beneficial for they cannot understand. Their "cause" is passion and their life reflects that especial teenage brilliance. So many lives are proudly run this way that many ministries succumb to this method of life decisions and try to replace passions that cause sin with an uninformed "passion for Jesus." Such people and ministries are especially susceptible to false teachers.

II Timothy 3:6-7 For among them are those who make their way into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and swayed by various impulses, who will listen to anybody and can never arrive at a knowledge of the truth.

The desires of the Spirit are in this way different from the desires of the flesh. Our possession of the Spirit rests on a response, belief, and conclusion regarding a Truth. This is an informed position on the Nature of Things. Wisely based passions, those existent as effects of truth, do function as future causes but they have been guided. They serve and harmonize with the truth that bred them. A wisely selected, passionately enjoyed wife (versus a passionately selected, wisely regretted one) does find her husband more enjoyably bound to the the marriage. When passion is an effect of a thoughtful good it can become a cause of good.

I Peter 1:13 says, "Therefore gird up your minds, be sober, set your hope fully upon the grace that is coming to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. "

Boo-Yah!

2009-03-31T11:26:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Molly Worthen, (correspondent to the stars and Edmund Burke monarchist) me and my faithful pipe have attained to a brief appearance in the Evangelical stratosphere.

My natural "soft spoken"ness precludes me vaunting myself in any kind of triumphal way but of course, you, my faithful vassals, can fill in the blank.

The Evantine Order for the Very Calm Life: Rule Five

2009-02-21T10:42:00.000-08:00

Mammon, unclaimed by any responsibility perceived by thy wife, shall be found in sufficient quantities in thy wallet upon entering a book selling establishment.

As the Scriptures say, "Money answers everything. While most Americans would freely chorus that loads of money would contribute to the Very Calm Life as they imagine it to be, this rule is about the "thing" purchased while remaining guilt free. We mentioned last rule that "pretty and lusty" was not a grant for totalitarian control. Still, in order to keep the pretty one in your marriage free from temptation to be contentious and fretful, we must not spend the children's milk money on books. But books are the point. The residue of a civilization is in these magical things.

Think for a moment on how perfect the needed interface between centuries is solved by the phonetic alphabet (Peace be upon the Phoenicians) , the invention of movable type (Peace be upon Gutenburg), and the sewn signature codex. Computers are a tool to that glorious end but they cannot compete for kingship in the interface. Sure all of this and more is on the Internet, but let's be frank, it isn't yours until you print it out. Then what do you have? A pile of paper, that's what. Your portion, your pillage of the Past is not to be had for keystroke, log in, and laser printer. The selection in your personal library announces the measure of your fief. What did you purchase? What did you want to know and how permanently did you want to have the source of that knowledge at hand to know again? A man or woman is measured to him, herself, and any that enter their library (please tell me you have one) by the collection. Staring down on us are spines declaring information which only years of conversation with the owner of the collection would give you. Do you see Dr. Johnson or Dr. Phil? And it is even more insulting if the second doctor is in hardback (and if they don't know of whom I was speaking regarding the first).

You cannot declare more about yourself and you cannot arrive at that place so declared, without books. Thus it is that the growth and change of your collection must never be hampered by insufficient funds as you stare at the outer door of a used book establishment. Many a wife will measure her best beloved by his checkbook, his knowledge of household appliances, his diligence in career. What those are is a slight momentary read such as a garden thermometer or the weather report for the week. His library, O goodwife, is the climate and the seasonal prospect of the place in which you dwell. Next time you walk into it (having, of course, genuflected at the door), stand a moment in its rich silence, then politely thank them.

The Evantine Order for the Very Calm Life: Rule Four

2009-02-12T15:32:00.000-08:00

Varieties of tobacco,
every desired kind of thine and thy friends,
shall plenteously fill thy storehouses,
shaken down and running over.

This is at least as important as the possession of a Good Wife to the advancement of Calm. Kipling famously said, "And a woman is only a woman but a good cigar is a smoke." In that poem (The Betrothed, see poster for sale here) the potential wife is demanding that her future husband choose between her and his cigars. Each Rule of the Very Calm Life is expected by the Abbot to "play well with the others". A wife with Calm providings will not deny you the other providers of Calm. No woman is pretty enough or lusty enough, to deny you butter, bacon, or books. Let her also not be peevish about tobacco. "Pretty and lusty" only can bring part of the Calm to a man. Let the shoemaker stick to his last.

Many years ago, I was (and am now) a smoker of both pipe and cigar. Also many years ago, the ministry in which my Amazing Missus and I engaged (and do now) is that of hospitality. The one was for me in my thinky moments and the other was for the Kingdom of God. And then an epiphany of goodness, pleasure, and the essential growth in Calm Living was given. A close friend of mine, as I visited him in his office, offered me a cigar. It was a very good cigar and it was offered within his office. The two worlds of thinky moments and hospitality became one. This friend, this saint, this "angel-straight-from-God" continued this offering every time I went by to see him. I solemnly affirmed that I would measure hospitality thusly, a "Hail Fellow, Well Met" sort of hospitality and that I might bless others as he did me.

The world of men (and very good women) wears the smell of burning tobacco as a badge of danger, thought, camaraderie, and conversation. Hold this leather chaired bliss out against a nanny-state world that is trying, with all engines running, to drive any semblance of "hearth side" from our allowance and cultural memories. As an aside, dastards like Mayor Bloomberg of NYC have moved to destroy any good thing that gives "enjoyment" higher status than "health" (he has banned trans fats and is working on salt). Men are not "allowed" to even smoke within the four walls for which their hard work has paid. All this is becoming an inhospitable Utopia where long life at any cost becomes the Hell they insist on calling Heaven. But we know, (don't we men?), that nothing can match (no pun intended) the bliss of staggering up from a table of eye-crossing victuals which ran with rivulets of "fat things", waddling into the library and lighting up a combustible dessert that some "man of God" pressed into your chubby hand. Let the welcome matte be laid out for similarly longing comrades. After food and drink, tobacco runs up the score. And when you offer a cigar, make it a good cigar wrapped in the memories of being rolled on the thighs of a large Jamaican woman.

By "plenteously", my friends, I mean so much or many that no note of selfishness will beset you as you open the box before them. Our Lord asks us to make friends for ourselves with unrighteous mammon. If I hand a visitor to my home three dollars, my gift would be soon forgotten. Make it a three dollar cigar and you have bought yourself a friend, for the same small monetary value, yes, but mixed with rare place and priceless company. This is a largesse, the scattering of which makes eternal friends. And nowadays what could be more "unrighteous" than smoking.

Tub Time: Who Do You Think You Are?

2009-02-10T09:27:00.000-08:00

Someone asked me the other day, "What is up with the perpetually offended?" I have written of these sorts before but an angle presented itself as I floated on my sea of Archimedean Displacement and Ivory Soap (it floats).
Let us say that someone gossiped about you. In other words, you were a victim of gossip. If you were a person of perpetual offense, you would say that "So-and-So sinned against me." While the phrasing is perhaps valid the meaning is not. So-and-So sinned against God with you as the victim. When you suggest to your own outraged feelings that the sin was against you, you suggest that you had promulgated a law against gossip and S0-and-So had failed to obey your law.

Now we can understand better the white rage with which the offended pose.
These twerps think they are gods.

The Evantine Order for the Very Calm Life: Rule Three

2009-02-03T11:13:00.000-08:00

Thou shalt have one lusty member of the weaker sex as thy spouse.

Does this go without saying? I'm just askin'.

For those whose sensitivities have been compromised by the Spirit of the Age (perhaps to the extent that they voted for Obama) this may seem a bit archaic, a bit medieval, the droolings of an unenlightened Idaho hick. Perhaps you are a man who doesn't want or wish for the Very Calm Life. Perhaps your version of life would invite the term "gelding" or perhaps you are just a little light in the loafers.
Perhaps you are offended at the patriarchal presumption this rule seems to take.
(I believe that one ought be a gentleman in the treatment of women and if the delicately nurtured have felt a little off putting occurred with words like "lusty" and "weaker", I completely understand and encourage you to read no further and perhaps leave this blog altogether.)
Perhaps that "Perhaps" was not the complaint of the delicately nurtured.
Perhaps you are a member of the "Sisters of the Fretted and Fevered Brow", the women who are angry at the supposition that they are (as the rule stated) the "weaker sex" but find that they are not strong enough to do anything about it. Bummer. That. has. got. to. sting.

The Evantine Abbey is a monastic order not a nunnery. You can make your own rules for the chicks. Heck, if you wait long enough I might get around to writing some. Number three could be rewritten to say, "Thou shalt have one strong man ("Que es Mas Macho" rating of 7 or higher) to tell you how to vote and stuff."

But to the real need and point, what is this rule not saying?
Marriage does not make the Very Calm Life. In fact the Scriptural Proverb in the running for the most repeated is "Better to dwell in the corner of the roof than under it with a contentious and fretful woman." Many women do not bring Calm along with them.

Points affirmed by the rule: This woman whom thou shalt marry will be the "weaker sex" referential to you. An Achilles can marry an Amazon but a Casper MilkToast had better not. A wife is not here to remake you, protect you, and provide for you. The weakness brings gentleness from the husband, and a more precise and civilized gentility.
The Scriptures say "Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them." Colossians 3:19
and "Likewise you husbands, live considerately with your wives, bestowing honor on the woman as the weaker sex, since you are joint heirs of the grace of life, in order that your prayers may not be hindered." I Peter 3:7
It also provides, as a more jeopardized citizenry in a man's kingdom, a greater need of clear border and better, wiser government.
She is given, in this protection, a realm, a domestic vision and a finite prospect for her efforts and daily contribution. Good things, that men like, get builded there. While a man has a more imperial prospect than his wife, the Calm Life exists most measured in the intimate aspect within the doors of his abode. The details, well builded, produce a calm which, like the smell of baking bread, reach the far corners of his imperial attempts and benefit those efforts. The civilization a good wife provides reaches out to inform the broader world of the benefit of that married couple's kingdom. And those Philistines you know(whose wives work professionally but don't domestically) will look on your archaic, medieval, and hickish life and wonder at, and perhaps damn, the beatific calm.

Don't think I skipped lightly over the word "lusty". A man wouldn't, nay shouldn't, marry at all if he has no desire for connubial bliss. But then, this rule is not about His desire but Hers. Having married, the blessing of his underwear being washed and folded is a collateral benefit but not a sufficient reason to pay the folder's medical bills for the foreseeable future. Lustiness in one's wife is the first and necessary signal to a calm man's sense that all is right in his world. She is First Citizen, Grand Vizier, Her Man's Lieutenant in all Things, chief beneficiary of all that he conquers, surveys, and eventually bequeaths. If she does not eagerly reward his urges, hail the conquering hero with some verve, then he has been measured at the closest vantage, by the best beloved, as not impressive enough to receive a woman's central contribution to marriage. It is what a man expects since the act of "one flesh" is the Creation of Eve Reason for leaving father and mother and cleaving. It is encouraged by the Apostle as avoiding and doing without is discouraged. Absence of this urge is sufficient reason to not marry at all. The other services a wife provides are more cheaply had by domestic staff and a passel of good friends.

Let us finish by saying that the Calm ratios are not met if the key and central reason for a man having a wife is met infrequently and disinterestedly. See if a woman has the same "you ought to tolerate this because God won't let you leave" assessment if the husband was "infrequent and disinterested" in fulfilling her expectations for provision in any area (emotionally, spiritually, financially, socially).
Build a life together which protects your wife's construction of a family civilization.
But a sexual buzzkill is no wife worth having.

The Evantine Order for the Very Calm Life: Rule Two

2009-01-21T11:24:00.000-08:00

The second is like unto the first.
Breakfast shall greet thee on thy descent
and it shall be of the hearty and hot kind.

What is the point of bacon and a constant supply of it within one's refrigerator if it does not emerge. And by emerge I mean like the superheated mass of Apollo's chariot heralding the day set before your glory seeking eyes. There is a declaration in the sizzle of bacon, hash browns, eggs, biscuits and sausage gravy (with a side of English muffin and marmalade should the wifely unit not have time to conjure the cinnamon rolls last seen in the beatific vision). That declaration is not merely the lusts of someone whose "god is their belly". While the list of foods is inspirational it is not Levitical Law. Those details, if stressed, can spoil the poetry and miss the point of these rules.

One of my communicants suggested that the thickness of the bacon should have been insisted upon in the first rule but I thought that the phrase "thick sliced bacon" bordered on the redundant. I avoid descriptive detail as our point dwells not in even the butter and bacon (peace be upon them) but in the soullessness of those who discount and avoid those glories.

The key words in this rule, that thy heart and eye shall follow (and shall not pity), are "breakfast", "greet", "descent", "hearty", and "hot".
The Very Calm Life is lived where no meals are missed. Hurried schedules betray you.
The Very Calm Life is lived when someone else cares enough or is paid enough to relieve you of fixing your own sustenance.
The Very Calm Life is multistoried. A ranch home is pedestrian.
The Very Calm Life is hearty enough to be wasted. "Is that all there is?", should not be a phrase falling from your lips as the last bits of Pop Tart or cereal disappear past them. And that provider of your morning needs has not just placed a box of Cheerios next to an empty bowl, spoon at the ready. We are not in a primitive society where the cooking art has not visited the mastodon we slew. That mastodon is made into sausage and fried up with three archeopteryx eggs (over medium).
So what do I mean?
Do not hurry, possess retainers, eschew the common, embrace the extra, and taste the art.

Ecclesiastes 5:19-20
Every man also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them, and to accept his lot and find enjoyment in his toil -- this is the gift of God. For he will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart.

The Evantine Order for the Very Calm Life: Rule One

2009-01-19T11:58:00.000-08:00

The Oracle, many years past, needed to describe what things, apart from righteousness and peace with God, conspired, when present, to calm the life on which they smiled. Those easily recognized things in the life of the Oracle, were jotted down and naturally became ten rules and with them the Evantine Order was born. The monks who submit to these regulations are a pious lot and easy to mark out from their fellow man by the wide grin on their countenance. This manuscript was found, marked with the coffee stains of centuries, taped to the wall above the author's computer desk. It is quite possibly the oldest copy of this wisdom in the hands of scholars today. We asked the author if it were and he said. "Yep."

What is the first of these guides to guideless man? This is.

Thy larder, aptly so named, shall be ever plenished with butter and bacon.

It sounds simple enough. Butter and bacon in the house, at all times, no exceptions. Why? If you can find a better repository of heavenly flavored fat, we will add it to the list.
No, margarine will not do. Margarine is evidence that the lower classes have been given too much money. They will buy a product on symbol alone. Is it vaguely yellow and does it come in a paper wrapped rectilinear form? Does it melt when heated? This is sufficient evidence that it must "taste" the same. It is cheaper. It looks like butter, but in fact is an idol, a graven image of the True which primitive and backward people have not the sophistication of discernment to measure.
This class of humanity thinks that if something bears the symbol of a reportedly good flavored item (say steak, or butter, or coffee) it will report not through the tongue and its taste buds but through the helpful symbol reader. Language becomes the real. These people think that Applebees really is a "neighborhood bar and grill". It has "stuff" up on the wall and handy pictures in the menu to be sure that your symbol reader will read steak when that animal product piece of gristle shows up at your table. Thus, since apple pie is known to be the All American Wonder dessert, the round pie shaped piece of sheet rock and apple sludge that your mother or wife made, is good. If the pie had something claiming to be a crust, the symbolist taster comments on what the symbol demands, flakiness, oh my yes, the flakiness. What passed their lips, tongue and taste buds without pausing for conversation, was oven hardened Play-Dough.

Tasters taste, they do not read their food.
Tasters who have seen Heaven opened in the form of butter and bacon will accept no substitute.
Because fat, well, fat satisfies. And butter and bacon are the Platonic form of fat.
It is a basic food group for those who love life. All lesser forms of fat are moved by sensibility to cost (and the ratio of taste lost to coinage saved is unsustainable) or fear ("I will become fat and die").
The Calm Life does not fear. It welcomes a fat death if you did not become fat on symbols. The Calm Life knows what it is enjoying and the path that enjoyment walked to pleasure. And if there were a hundred dollar difference between butter and margarine, it would just mean that the Calm Life would have to wait until you could afford it.

I Don't Have the Time.

2009-01-12T11:49:00.000-08:00

If we are not pantheists (in which all is god) than God is discrete from that which is not God. He knows that which is Himself and that which is not. And given those two realms of that which is (God and not-God), the referent of a point of knowledge which God possesses can be spoken of as being either Actual or Conceptual. That which is Actual has a referent outside of God. It exists and isn't God. That which is Conceptual has a referent inside of God (a mental construct as memory or anticipation would be) and it has no non-God actuality.
When the question of God's foreknowledge (or past-knowledge for that matter) arises, these two categories do as well. Is God outside of Time looking down on Actualities? Or is Time not in question at all because God's knowledge of the future (or the past) is Conceptual? I mention the past, for so many wish to create a special sphere of atemporality in which God might dwell without examining whether or not they are talking nonsense. If God is looking down on Time from an atemporal vantage then those things observed are Actual and existent. Christ is still on the cross (for God) and always was (for God) and will be forevermore. The Trinity can never be fully united for those words of Christ, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" will ring in actual existence for God, forever. Amen? That or the knowledge of God regarding the past is Conceptual (just like your memories) and He "remembers" what was, not sees what was but saw. Maybe, dare I suggest it, that God's knowledge of the Future is equivalently Conceptual? In fact, the Death of Christ on the cross is burdensome for Future thought as well as Past. Why, you ask? The Trinity of God,(atemporal and dealing with Actualities), has been eternally lacking in Triuneness since He has been eternally in a knowledge relationship with everything that is Actual and that Actual, (because Actual) binds and defines the content of truth of the thing known. So the Actual crucified state of Jesus is and was and will be (from our temporal vantage and language) the state of God. And to add insult to the injury of this silly talk of Time, God's relationship with Himself in the Trinity is also known and enjoyed as united for there have been "Times" when the atemporal God looked down on Actual non-separation AND rejoiced in the Tiune presence of the Conceptual knowledge of Himself, fully and truly united. So... Actual separation and Actual non-separation both being true for God in the same "God-moment" regarding the same characters. Looks like you either have to throw out the "Universal Law of Non-Contradiction (A cannot be non-A) or throw out Time.
So...
It is actually a choice between you being able to "know" anything because you have made statements which call laws of Logic into question or you reject a dimension called Time. It was cute when you didn't think about it too much.

And if you are a Calvinist, God help you, but you didn't need Time in the first place. Your benighted definition of God has His foreknowledge resting in the Decree, not foresight and atemporality.

Big Haus Christmas

2009-01-12T11:18:00.000-08:00

She did what????

2008-11-25T10:46:00.000-08:00

Some like horror films. I do not but some do. These are unlike more positive films such as adventures and comedies where we envy the heroism or the wit of the characters. A horror film has much of its pleasure tied up in the fact that it is "Not You" going through this. There is a comfort in knowing that at any moment, when the terror becomes to much, you can get up to go to the bathroom (if you didn't inadvertently do so already). Gossip gets it perversity in that particular arena.

Our self interest is very pronounced. We are constantly measuring and wishing and working to make our Self the very best, the Nonesuch. We are ever conscious of what could be a failure in us. And here, the side sin of, and the pleasure of gossip is in the telling of failures. But there are many times when the telling of failure is good and godly; this is where it is not. If the telling of failure gets its currency from the fact that it is "not you" than it is gossip. It will never be a failure about you. Notice that it is impossible, self evidently impossible, to gossip about yourself. So if comparing notes over the failure of someone (be it folly or sin or just poor work by a business) that has none of its satisfaction in the "not you" category, then it will not be gossip. The failures considered and discussed, you may or may not take to the failing, and you may or may not share it with others whose interests are somehow invested. (The reason you only tell the invested of the failure is that without being invested, the only point of the information becomes how it was "not them".) You may even rejoice in the fall of the wicked or foolish but if you take no pleasure in it being "not you", you have not gossiped.

Now those of whom the stories of failure are told would like to have a much broader definition then I have given. Of course they would. A sinner, a foolish man, or a poorly handled business would like to control the bad press. They call that which is not, "gossip" to lower the damage by preaching a code that they might guilt their righteousness examiners into buying. These are of The Anointed Never Failing Clan and, although gossip does exist and is a sin, I would not determine its presence by the definitions they may give. I believe that the Obama campaign is and was a member in good standing of this set. If Obama said something socialist, you looked up a definition for socialism and subsequently referred to the president-elect as a socialist, they immediately called you a racist. The basic tack is to broaden definitions so that all that accuse would be instantaneously guilty of something horrifying.

Of course, when any of these failures arise in others, some tale bearing vultures do cluster around the dead to feed on something other than the measurement of evil, folly and error. This is a risk the wise must take for there would be no possibility of wisdom without the examination and measurement of evil, folly and error. Even when a church announces a righteous excommunication, someone in the pew will be feeling the pleasure of gossip. They will pass the information on with sincere tones of righteousness offended but their joy will be in that it was "not me".

The pleasure of gossip can thus be enjoyed all alone without ever telling anyone anything. That the news came to you did not make it gossip (because it could come to you in all innocence) but the song your heart began to sing on the hearing did.

Gossip traditionally is a chain of communication (sometimes vast) with guilt potentially at every step. That you gossip with others who are obviously "not you" does not pose a falsification of my claim. Those we tell are, at least for the current moment, less "not you" than the subject of the gossip. We embrace them with the "news" and an intimacy arises. Notice the feeling of the shared moment. Is there not a camaraderie? In a sense a club is formed called "Let us look together on this calamity of which the chief good is that it is not we" and we go about seeking new members.

I Don't Like to Post Quotes but....

2008-11-14T10:26:00.000-08:00

The master of any claim I might have to heterosexuality has a post up here.
Go there and read, weep, point and laugh, or sit in stupefied disbelief.
When you are done, return and read these few quotes from C.S. Lewis' essay Lilies that Fester.
I don't think that I would ever have said this.... but Jason shares a solid insight with St. Clive.

"The loftier the pretensions of the power, the more meddlesome, inhuman, and oppressive it will be. Theocracy is the worst of all possible governments."

"Anything transcendental or spiritual, or even anything very strongly ethical, in its pretensions is dangerous and encourages it to meddle with our private lives."

"There are, as in piety, so in culture, states which, if less culpable, are no less disastrous. In the one we have the “Goody-goody”; the docile youth who has neither revolted against nor risen above the routine pietisms and respectabilities of his home. His conformity has won the approval of his parents, his influential neighbours, and his own conscience. He does not know that he has missed anything and is content. In the other, we have the adaptable youth to whom poetry has always been something” Set” for” evaluation”. Success in this exercise has given him pleasure and let him into the ruling class. He does not know what he has missed, does not know that poetry ever had any other purpose, and is content.
Both types are much to be pitied: but both can sometimes be very nasty. Both may exhibit spiritual pride, but each in its proper form, since the one has succeeded by acquiescence and repression, but the other by repeated victory in competitive performances. To the pride of the one, sly, simpering, and demure, we might apply Mr. Allen’s word” smug” (especially if we let in a little of its older sense). My epithet for the other would, I think, be “swaggering”. It tends in my experience to be raw, truculent, eager to give pain, insatiable in its demands for submission, resentful and suspicious of disagreement. Where the goody-goody slinks and sidles and purrs (and sometimes scratches) like a cat, his opposite number in the ranks of the cultured gobbles like an enraged turkey. And perhaps both types are less curable than the hypocrite proper. A hypocrite might (conceivably) repent and mend; or he might be unmasked and rendered innocuous. But who could bring to repentance, and who can unmask, those who were attempting no deception? who don’t know that they are not the real thing because they don’t know that there ever was a real thing?
Lastly I reach the point where my objections to Theocracy and to Charientocracy are almost identical. “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” The higher the pretensions of our rulers are, the more meddlesome and impertinent their rule is likely to be and the more the thing in whose name they rule will be defiled. The highest things have the most precarious foothold in our nature. By making sanctity or culture a moyen de parvenir [means of arriving, ed.] you help to drive them out of the world. Let our masters leave these two, at least, alone; leave us some region where the spontaneous, the unmarketable, the utterly private, can still exist."

Be Still My Beatin' Heart!

2008-11-13T14:28:00.000-08:00

At last!
Big Haus embroidery made available at Federal Bailout Prices!
Check out the Amazing Missus as she models this stylish bit of hauswifery. Think of how your reputation will be benefited, O chefs and chefettes. Others will look upon you (as you slave over the hot stove or grill) and note that you cast the ominous shadow of a thinky sort of cook.

Yes, you can buy one (or twelve) here.
They come in black, red and stone.

Do your part in making Big Haus a haushold name.
(There is also a briefcase for those types who need to carry the various bookish things they also purchased from BigHausLoot.com.)

Futilitarian Thought for the Day

2008-11-06T10:39:00.000-08:00

Not only will you age and die but you will age and die for a reason. And when you are older, it becomes easier to sicken and harder to shake. Cancers spring up. Guess you should not have drunk that carcinogenic Kool Aid that all the cool people were drinking. Once you realize the short distance between "cool" and "fool", you can fight it and, bless God, live to die another day of a more benign disease or just the wear and tear of age.

You know, like Great Britain.

Very Superstitious

2008-11-04T13:28:00.000-08:00

The superstitious are an odd lot. They have fallen into post hoc ergo propter hoc in extremis and can't get up. For them, all things that precede are potentially causal to any thing that may follow. In fact, the selection of which cause on which they depend is more intensely valued for an absence of any degree on demonstrable causality. The nature of an epistemological truth bearing connection is a mystery to them but that mystery leaves them believing the least supportable.
If an intelligent person is one who can apply the information learned in the way which they were taught to apply it (in other words, a linear way) and an intellect is one who can validly connect information learned in ways not taught (a lateral way) then the superstitious, while they might be intelligent, are faux-intellects. They make unsupportable lateral connections. They claim causes and point to relationships for which there is no epistemological defense.
For the unbeliever in Christianity (who is "without hope or God in the world") and who is ignorant of where truth comes from, there is a desperate need to fill their world with explanatory notes. So superstition becomes a fake metaphysic and a fake intellection.

Within the Faith there is a similar camp ("who base their faith on visions and are puffed up without reason by their sensuous mind"). They are the "rocky ground" on whom the Word of God is sown and whose acceptance of the Gospel lacks root and depth. And just like the superstitious, they cast about for any proffered myth (as replacement filler) with Christian terms to also build a fake metaphysic and fake intellection.
II Timothy 3:6-7 For among them are those who make their way into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and swayed by various impulses, who will listen to anybody and can never arrive at a knowledge of the truth.

If they ever hold the truth, it is only by accident. It is never because they need the truth but because they need to believe and since they lack the guidance of truth bearing commodities they "listen to anybody" and fill their devotional library with the ridiculous.

Long Version: The Song of the Futilitarian

2008-10-31T10:58:00.000-07:00

De Futilitate

This life of yours, it has an end.
You’re being slowly torn apart
In gears of vast and broke machine,
And in each honest story told
Since Man began to lose his life,
Decay and Death, and Death again.

You can’t ignore for long this noise,
Once heard gives ample time to hate
This end to all you do on earth,
And screams won’t even slow it down.

In passing goods and seeming gains
We find a path of beauty still,
For Times arrive for eye and ear,
To get, enjoy, (but never fill),
With Good and Wise and Known and Joy.
But even Joy is now and gone.
As is “embrace”, or “war”, or “wife”,
Or artful “stones” we put in piles.

Until arrives the death which comes,
Those passing goods and seeming gains
Presume to answer “Bigger Barns”.
But God replies, “Tonight, you fool,
This night, your soul must die.
Moths will dine on what you saved,
And fools will spend what else remains,
With worms to tidy up the grave.”

Say it aloud that we have sinned.
Then God remade the good world bent,
That none of us can make it straight,
And, with it, we are bound and dead.

You can’t ignore for long this noise,
Once heard gives ample time to hate
This end to all you do on earth,
And rage won’t even slow it down.

Will you take Hate of pointlessness
o’er Joy in all the passing good?
Both cry of crushing vanity,
But hatred is, for you, a sad
Belief this world was something else.
This choice you make, do choose it wise.
There’s more and much that Hatred miss’d,
The Beauty of those certain Times,
That leaves in fatal Vanity
A chaos uglied unto death.

But who can know the time of things,
Their time of beauty understood?
It’s he who serves the Living God,
The God who made all heav’ns and earth.
For in such fear is wisdom deep,
And in this terror knowledge fine,
And Joy to seek the sought and found.
So in futility enjoy!

‘Tis all a great calamity
Of chaos, close and personal,
For all things made and suff’ring it.
Ask them if dying has a hope,
A hope God carved into Death.

Not that they hope to die or not.
And though they pray without a voice,
Unspoken groans we share alike,
(for where our treasure is, our heart).
We do not fear a killing will
That which, after it did us dead,
Can nothing more to any do.

For we, and all of Nature here,
Have feared, enjoyed, and wait for Him.
He who, after He has us killed,
The soul He can destroy in Hell.
Yes, Him we fear in single faith.
And having feared the Living God,
Find His good servants faithful still
With Joy and Wisdom, Known and Lov’d
Within the bright Futility,
Welcomes to Death, with each “Well Done!”
And enter they the Master’s Joy
Hereafter and Forevermore.

by Evan Wilson

A Short Version

2008-10-30T10:07:00.000-07:00

That you will die is certain.
All that you do is dust.
Enjoy it as it passes by,
In fear of God the Just.
For after death is judgment,
To punish or reward
If that day goes well for you,
Again enjoy,
Enjoy the Lord.

Of Governing

2008-10-22T16:51:00.000-07:00

"the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient," I Timothy 1:9

I was thinking about how governments differ in effecting an obedient citizenry. Civil magistrates rely on the promulgation of laws with the threat of pain for the violator. Parents do this for a time but as age and maturity (and the wisdom of earlier laws) have their effect, the children are rightly granted a different relationship to their erstwhile rulers. Wives actually begin in that different than law and order relationship when they marry their husbands. We are told from the outset to not be harsh with them. And yet there is still a governance between husband and wife. The church shares that kind of rule in that elders are told not to be domineering.
It is with the church we get a sense of this shift in governing type. The government which has the legitimate expectation of, or actual existence of a shared desire, (the virtue of the ruler's desired ends for his fief), the task before the ruler is to shape his imperium to express, not with commands and their attendant punishments, but with a pattern of example. Example is what desire needs to grow into a more obedient citizen. In this case the citizen truly wants what the ruler wants and needs but the guidance of the exemplar. Even in a political society, an advanced civilization enjoys many benefits from a citizenry which desires the same peace (say regarding traffic proprieties) and that desire lays a foundation of an example based obedience which a third world traffic situation fails to even recognize.
Where the desire of the citizen is not engaged then various other forms of adjustment into obedience are necessary. The completely resistant criminal class faces pain. The slightly more understanding citizen, while still perhaps disagreeable, adjusts behavior with the threat of said pain. Those that understand the benefits promised to the obedient, obey, not for desire of the ruling virtue, but for a reward arbitrarily connected to the act.

I speak generally and I am sure it might raise numerous questions but for these purposes, enough has been said regarding my schematic. The problem of the criminal, threatened, or promised classes is not that they exist, for they always will. God has appointed magistrates attending to this very thing. The problem is that some, which ought to be moved by desire for the shared virtues of the ruler, are not. They remain perniciously in the lower forms of governance. I speak of older children (teenager and up), wives, and Christian parishioners. Justice says that the causal agent is responsible to the degree causal. Insubordinate children, uppity wives, and unresponsive pew dwellers should certainly carry all the fault, oughtn't they? An order was given, and (horrors!) it was not obeyed. But the peace of a fiefdom is the measure of its ruler. Can or can not the ruler correctly and capably police the confines of his assigned borders and bring about peace? All too often the ruler believes that a failed obedience (acting like the lower class of citizen) on the part of one of these close type of citizen, requires the application of doggie biscuit promise, or increasingly voluble threats and punishments. He descends to the level they chose to occupy. The aroma of the home or ecclesia becomes an odor.

What the ruler should realize is that these citizens are in desperate need of his example. And the example is pointless if the ruling virtue (that which he designed his fief upon) is not desired. What "kind of peace" the father, the husband or the pastor wants obeyed in his fief is the primary villain in theis post. His designs are the culprit, the actual disobedience and crime against his attempt at peaceful rule. If the natural virtue of a child's admiration or a wife's love, or a congregation's indwelling of the Holy Spirit is turned away because the proper task to be desired is not promulgated by the ruler, that ruler will have to fall back on domineering or violent tactics to crush the rebellion he asked for.

Might the Apostles recommend a few simple things?
Fathers, do not provoke your children, husbands, honor your wives, and pastors, set an example of Christian conduct.
and with due humility, the Oracle would like it if you would perhaps check on something as well.

If your children, wives, or congregants don't desire to be just like you wish, is it because you are no example of what you ask or is it because what you ask is "world-without-end" silly?

On the Scots

2008-10-17T12:58:00.000-07:00

J. Buchan (peace be upon him) described the Scots as a people of "fevered beliefs and unprofitable loyalties". Besides the poetic brilliance of such an observation of his and my people, it came to mind that it also described a certain type of American citizen. They can be very bright. They can even be good looking. What they lack is that "fey" charm of standing about in mists tootling on some contraption which, by all reports, must have a dying cat of irritable sentiments sewn up in its bag. What I mean is these Americans of fever and unprofit are not charming nor are they historic or attractive to tourists.
Politically it would be the Greens or Ron Paul supporters. Religiously, the fundementalist or atheist. Culturally, the neo-agrarians or comic books aficianados.
Perhaps you know or are such a person.

There is no medicine for your fever better than being chased through the damp heather alone and forgotten.
Your loyalty can be perhaps enjoyed, as the Scots learned, as a lost cause.
The Oracle suggests those two remedies. Take daily for two to five centuries and you too might finally find that you have gained respite from what about you annoys the heck out of everyone else.
You will be, with the Bonnie Prince, charming. (no pun intended)

In Search of Fools

2008-10-13T15:01:00.000-07:00

The “praise” of Folly, faint and damn’d thereby,
Gives op’ning vents to tongues that wag with wit
And writings pen’d with acid, drunk with lye,
Which wake we wise to serve it up with spit.

As prizes go, they wallow slow and low,
Galleons of Spain aload with stolen gold.
Then we, the Raleighs, Drakes, on sight, below
Our decks, broadside what sixty pounders told.

Or big game shot like buffalo these days,
No longer Injun style in race of man
And thund’ring horse and herd. He hunts who pays
For pastured beast, to shoot them where they stand.

Are we made wits by stolid prey? Are we
In piracy engaged, excused by Queen?
Are we those hunting that which cannot flee,
And in such ease become those fools we’ve seen?

by Evan Wilson

Take the Red Pill

2008-10-03T10:25:00.000-07:00

St. Paul found himself at the end of his life with martyrdom staring him in the face. His ministry was slipping in its support as "all in Asia have turned away". At this point Timothy, in the second letter of, received a very encouraging reminder of what the Christian life is all about.

When the haze of your excitement in getting followers and creating movements fades, you are left with whatever remnant of spiritual reality your sorry soul actually has.
It is an imperative in chapter 1:13 that strikes me poignantly: "Follow the pattern of the sound words which you have heard from me".
Without a movement around you, without your Christian rap album being successful, without whatever adolescent wish fulfillment fantasy in which you engage in the name of Jesus Christ (and call the resulting whimper "faith"), with what are you left to "follow?"
A "pattern" is when things, in time or place, sit in repeated reference to each other.
To be "sound" a claim has to have an demonstrable integrity.
And "from me" is a presumption of authority.

Timothy's responsibility, and I hope yours as well, is to follow the guide of these things. In more modern terms, there is a "systematic" which exists for your discovery and submission. For the more modern yet, a "matrix" exists objectively along side many fantasies.
The pattern that St. Paul confers on Timothy is one that Timothy can actually experience, and "see". The pattern will show how the parts of it sit in reference to the other parts. It is an empirically enjoyed pattern, one that we follow while standing in the midst of it in wonder.

Paul has wrapped this invitation to patterned living in two more epistemological claims. He seems to think that it is important that his teaching of the pattern and the pattern itself be rational. Without reason the "soundness" is unexaminable. Teaching "patterns" often involves specious claims and fallacious arguments. Many rituals in life (and for life) have no visible means of support. The purveyors of these hope that no one examines them for a while so that soundness is now measured, not by reason, but by magisterium, movement loyalties, and loud hollerin' about orthodoxy. One of the benefits of that which is "sound," is that its rational integrity can always be revisited. Along side that rational defense of the pattern he offers, St. Paul offers his own bona fides. "From me" matters. I cannot say the same. The authority I report to others of the pattern is no different that of the Apostle's. It is not a difference which separates St. Paul and The Oracle. It is distance.
I, too, offer that which must exist in pattern to be both followed and enjoyed, experienced empirically by the saints so taught.
I, too, must appeal to reason to sustain the testing of my pattern and celebrate the triumph of "soundness".
I, too, will refer to authority. But those to whom God spoke have a relationship with revelatory authority that is decisive. It is an epistemological authority regarding which I stand (in using) both at a distance of person and time. I can offer only the revelations of the Apostles and Prophets that have been communicated to me. If I support a pattern to be followed, other than what Reason and Apostolic Revelation say, I must claim to be inspired. I will not. Others have. It is suspected that such fall into another category of Christian teacher.
"and from among your own selves will arise men speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them. " Acts 20:30
This prophesy came true. It was given to the Ephesian elders. The next few verses of II Timothy 1 let us know that Ephesus of Asia is central to the desertion of St. Paul.

The Oracle suggests that you, yourself, find the pattern declared by Reason and the Apostle. Live by it. If you run into the Orthodox, smile, be sweet, and know they took the Blue Pill.

Play That Funky Music White Boy!

2008-09-12T12:13:00.000-07:00

Its a music week in Oracularstan. I survey my fief and find that they, the citizens, have burst into song.
First, my lovely daughter Michalangela, is releasing her first album with Blue Whisper Records and is coming to town to have a CD release gig at Bucers this Friday, September 19.

Second, the heir apparent laid down a track in a recording studio with Jason the Rad (whose authority I respect). It is mind numbing rock.

To listen go here.

Lastly, the Amazing Missus (and her band which includes Graeme) performs this Saturday, September 13 at the fair, main stage 4:30

This does not even include Bella Jazz Ensemble which started practicing this week and Gunn playing piano and singing Ben Folds and White Stripes stuff at The NuArt Open Mike Night.

I, whom you trust implicitly for guidance in things not musical, I listen. Hope you do too.

This or That Side of the Line

2008-09-11T10:10:00.000-07:00

I John 3:4 Every one who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness.
That was simple. It would also follow that the "sin" done was done against the purveyor of the law. Sins exist in a hierarchy parallel to the governments which issue the laws. Whatever the case, sin is evidently law dependent. It can't even exist without a law. A line has to exist before I might cross it.
Romans 4:15 For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression.
Romans 5:13 .... sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law.

So sin is not a force. Sin is rebellion. And law is not the answer but the necessary cause. But the law is good. What sort of good? It is (in whatever realm of law) the measure of that realm's authority as to what is the wise extent of its citizens' freedom. This very rarely would align with the citizen's desires for his freedom. It is why the lawgiver has to say something and attach punishments to any violation. The law is only a measure of wisdom not a method.
Galatians 2:21 I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification were through the law, then Christ died to no purpose.

Christians the world over and through many centuries have had a dim view of sin. They naturally, when seeing sin, see the law that made it such and also see "this side of the line drawn" as holiness and the other as transgression. Correct thus far. We have erred in our definition of the problem and consequently we err in our attempts to stave off evil. We see ourselves traveling across the line into sin and so we attempt make the line a speed bump, then a fence, and then a wall and the a DMZ complete with concertina wire and land mines. The problem is not that the law and its punishments are not loud or vigorous enough but is the disconnect between our desires and the lawgiver's which brought the law into being.

We, in Christ, are being changed into His likeness. As the Holy Spirit works in us we are remade into His desires. The Christian is one who has found, like Christ, that God's design of His world is our new desire and His wisdom is becoming our wisdom.
Galatians 5:16 -18 But I say, walk by the Spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you would. But if you are led by the Spirit you are not under the law.

The Oracle is, to quote a prophet, one of your own (Outback Steakhouse commercials), "No rules, just right."

The Actual and Its Decoration

2008-08-27T10:35:00.000-07:00

At a wedding, we used to decorate a woman's virginity with a white dress. Such is no longer the case. Women who have lived with their boyfriend for years opt for a white dress because it has become the traditional women's wear for the occasion. It is often the case that that which we valued enough to decorate is replaced by the decoration itself. At least the decoration become as important and folks need to do hard thinking to merely see the thing and its decoration discretely and separately. Do we need a Christmas tree to value the Incarnation? So it is with the Gospel. What is the message that saves and what is its decoration?

"What must I do to be saved?" asked the jailer in Philippi. What would you answer? St. Paul suggested that the jailer "believe in the Lord Jesus". That is the sufficient and necessary condition for salvation but what does this "belief" contain? Does it contain baptism? Does it contain repentance from sin? Does it contain calling on God? Does it contain church membership? The list goes on and many brands of Christian adherents would be happy to suggest additions to that list. Some decorate with the patina of age, some with art, some with new ideas hatched by evangelicals.

Saint Paul in Romans 10 makes it clear:
4 For Christ is the end of the law, that every one who has faith may be justified. 5 Moses writes that the man who practices the righteousness which is based on the law shall live by it. 6 But the righteousness based on faith says, Do not say in your heart, "Who will ascend into heaven?" (that is, to bring Christ down) 7 or "Who will descend into the abyss?" (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). 8 But what does it say? The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart (that is, the word of faith which we preach); 9 because, if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved. 11 The scripture says, "No one who believes in him will be put to shame." 12 For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and bestows his riches upon all who call upon him. 13 For, "every one who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved." 14 But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher? 15 And how can men preach unless they are sent? As it is written, "How beautiful are the feet of those who preach good news!" 16 But they have not all obeyed the gospel; for Isaiah says, "Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?" 17 So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ.

The Oracle sez: A propositional agreement to the claims of Christ's person and atonement with the response of turning from your sins and calling on God for forgiveness will bring to you the grace of God unto eternal life. Nothing less will work and nothing more is needful. All the rest is decoration. In some cases we decorate as authoritatively instructed and in some our decoration is ripe with our own artistic developments, now or in the past. Don't confuse the decorations with Faith Alone or it will not be Faith Alone for long.

If Pride is Wrong, Ought we Honor?

2008-08-18T15:06:00.000-07:00

"Outdo one another in showing honor" (Romans 12:10). Honor is an odd thing. Most Christians would think that any thought of joy in your achievements would be the immoral Pride of Life. Honor then seems, in their minds, like showing up at church in a short skirt and plunging neckline. If Honor is a pleasurable gift we give to those we honor at the recognition of their dignity or accomplishment, are we not tempting them to pride? Why, in heaven's name, are we are told by the Apostle to do it? Maybe the pleasure serves a purpose for which it is worth risking pride.

We all agree, of course, that flattery is wrong, but why? The Scripture tells us to honor and not to flatter. In this distinction people need, before God, to know who they are, and honest honor is "another lips praising you and not your own" (Proverbs 27:2). This helps them know, confidently and with pleasure, the reach of humanity that they have arrived at being. They need to know, for God has delegated to them this Self, and that Self will one day be judged by God. They need to know accurately (risking, but not necessitating pride) or they, with conceit, would be pleased at the false. "For by the grace given to me I bid every one among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith which God has assigned him." Romans 12:3. Why is it Christians have, over the years, suspected that any pleasure for self was evil? Why did God make sex feel so good? And art so sublime? And honor about an achievement so satisfying? Those pleasures were made by God, and God, it says, "tempts no one". These things draw us as much to the good that God intended in their creation as to the bad.

All these gifts of God have a service which God desired and to which we must make payments. Husbands and wives must give each other conjugal rights. That there is, in fact, an erotically charged book in the Bible intimates that God wishes His good gifts to be pursued. Praise is an obligation, just like sex in marriage. And just like sex in marriage, it is the other which we serve with our action. The Lover, the Artist and the Praise-giver have their own share in the pleasure, but their task is clearly the communication of pleasures to the Loved, the Audience, and the Honored.

So as we honor, honestly and persistently, we announce the gains a man or woman has made to the ears of that man or woman. We tell them that their efforts have born fruit. Yes, they really do deserve that trophy. Just as when we praise God and we declare His great deeds, so it is with praising others. We announce to them that they are truly becoming that which a man is or can be. Since he is defined by the extent and success of his will, your honor to him is a scale, measuring what he willed and how he succeeded.

A world that markets Fear, be it in the News, the commercials, the worrying mothers, or the wusses we used to call "fathers" or "men", is playing a part in this game as well. While flattery is the usually insincere and certainly inflated measurement of the standing of he whom we honor, Fear is the measure of what still stands outside threatening the success of our will. In the purveying of Fear is the constant suggestion that defeat and loss are its currency. It says "you are not man enough to withstand this...". Fear announces, sometimes truly, that other things, Accident, Luck, Providence, the governments, or God Himself are real agents who rule an area outside our will. Flattery is dangerous because it tells us to go where angels fear to tread. And it is natural that we should fear going where we have not the chops to successfully rule. But where is fear bad? Fear is bad when it makes of us cowards. Fear is bad when your very humanity is jeopardized by an incorrect belief that you could not do what you certainly could and should. You become "safer" and your world becomes a zoo, where you can look "wild at heart" but never wander past unnatural confines. The fences are high, all the rocks are rounded, and they offer a diet and medicines promising to abate all futility— all this because you are too afraid to run your own life at the measure which God assigned. And that fear made you back up from and give up key elements of your humanity. You are left, not with rule by reason and wisdom, but with a packaged and plastic play area in which your most ignoble urges can play.... with a helmet. Perhaps if we honored others like we were told, we could hinder this culture of the terrified.

The Well of Fear

2008-08-04T14:33:00.000-07:00

The well of Fear is deep, perhaps bottomless. It will never run dry. We as a nation used to run on Hope, hope in our abilities and hope in our future, and for some hope in God. But now in commercials, news broadcasts, pulpits, and homes the key to most of our choices is fear. Death and calamity lies like a screen before all our eyes and promises to have at us. BREAKING NEWS! We run around in panicked circles, encouraged by the constant cries of alarm, slapping helmets on our children, increasing our chances by 8% against heart attack with Garlique, and finding our stomachs churning at the death of any soldiers in Iraq. The percentage of women in our nation has risen from 50-51% to almost 85%. Timorous wusses.
The smell of our own terrors washes through our homes. The mothers of the land have the support of all communication and product. Little Johnny, just as his Self starts to consciously commune with the Other, finds, (instead of the natural balance of Hope and Fear), finds Fear alone. The parents believe they are protecting him with his helmet and his homeschool but they have merely moved the threat level to High and he has a greater possible likelihood of pulling back. Mother doesn't like him to go very far into the Other anyway. Let us just put up another barrier. Lets not talk to the Other at all. Let us shut the door behind us and have it be the kind that neither we or they can unlock.
No, it is not a mature choice. And no they can't explain it. Yes, someone else's little Johnny got hurt badly on his bicycle. This Fear is inordinate.
So it does not surprise me that more and more children are choosing autism. Safety first.

Now About Your Salvation....

2008-07-31T11:47:00.000-07:00

Many years ago I was in a discussion with a gentleman whose view of the Gospel was such that it was designed to help his theological team "win". You know, the denomination or systematic which arrives at the Last Day with the most adherents wins something, not sure what. He saw the failure to include a key point of his theology as trafficking in a "false gospel" (the damnable kind) instead of a saving message which once believed transferred a soul from death to life. I informed him that neither he nor the inventor of his systematic distinctive had been hoisted onto a cross for my moral and eternal benefit.

I wanted to write up a statement of the Gospel for which he, I, and any other regenerated person would bless God and say "Amen!" This image is a graphical display of that effort. No, it is not clear on everything it addresses but it is clear enough for the sinner.

Feel free to send it on to whomever and wherever. I have an 11x17 vector file PDF if anyone wants a printable version.

For all the detritus that comes through my email with star bursts, rainbows, and puppies, perhaps the message of Jesus Christ would land in the unbelievers mailbox and convict of sin, righteousness and judgment. Or perhaps some believer, who like my friend, can't and hasn't distinguished the forest from the trees and mixes that which saves with all the wisdom or folly of his church, that he would know what he needed to say if he were to faithfully preach Christ and Him Crucified.

Of Arcadia: What Sports Mean to Me

2008-07-15T11:13:00.000-07:00

It was the sound of cleats on pavement. That and the artificial mass of shoulder pads claiming more grandiose things for the pleasuring of woman than the scrawny teenager within could compass. For heaven’s sake, we looked like a herd of bison, big helmeted heads lolling before the massive humps, with our equally artificial flanks tightly shoving us across the parking lot to the showers. If only any desirable girl, (and the standards were pretty low as to what made one of those), happened to be standing for unknown reasons somewhere proximous after school for a couple of hours, if that desirable one lifted her head, shook her auburn hair and smelt the testosterone on the breeze, she would look, with a meaning that her nubile frame could not decipher, our way. The herd would announce their seriousness regarding football on the echo chamber that was the faculty parking lot of our notable, Michigan high school. The grass of the practice field had barely acknowledged that these were the glory days of metal cleats. There, in wind sprint after wind sprint, grass and spike only met to give us a foothold, but the asphalt, it gave us standing. It said to all that the herd was advancing from the prairie to its pen and would be available for the lusty stare, which my get up and make up assumed, of one desirable woman. She would scan the lumbering mass of a 160 spent frames and would single out a certain jersey, mine, with huge purple digits naming me for her.
I have no idea what my number was. This is not because I have a bad memory, (which I do) but because I am not entirely sure I new what it was then. The number was unimportant. It was unlikely that that number would be called upon to do anything on the field of play. The number was a shape, a graphic whose effects, on which I counted along with the lusts the cleats evoked and the shoulder pads broad seduction, would be incomplete without that number. She would know me in the herd because I was the one spinning her fortunes out on loom of Spalding Athletic gear. I can only assume that all the rest of the team enjoyed the game. Perhaps these teammates, more the bison than they realized, hoped to be made heroes on the gridiron and thereby elevated to a good college or just to the bed of one of the cheerleaders. They obviously couldn’t write a story to save their lives. I stepped along side of them as a creature of myth, using their sincerity as a prop for a greater tale. She, the desirable babe, would see me alone among them because my soul, an artist, a man with sight, had donned the uniform and served humbly in the trenches along side fellows who wouldn’t know beauty if it slapped them on the fanny. How could she want anyone else?
The lot was crossed without even successfully spotting the she creature that had picked me for breeding. Suddenly the secret bliss of being deservedly desired fell away and the locker room erupted with smell of sock, jockstrap, and exertion. The only memory of the field behind us was the salty sweet taste of homemade Gatorade and a grass stain where Maurice Reese had applied 245 black pounds of first string Newtonian physics to my 145 pounds of white-assed, third string, “red squad” body at only temporary rest. I was lucky to get away with a stain. She certainly would not have watched the practice itself and could not have witnessed my downfall. She was there late in the afternoon for entirely different reasons and was probably somewhat antagonistic to the sporting life. Hence her eye should fall on me, a dichotomy she knew from some art class, who was not like the other jock brains but one who merely had strapped on the pads to cause a tingling in her resistant temper. Just enough male for her female and more than enough insight for her soul. Surely she had not watched practice for any length of time, at least not the time where my body found itself wrapped about the foreparts of Mr. Reese as he expressed his antagonism for whitey.
A shower later and with the realization that my second string brother was waiting in the parking lot because he had the car keys and the driving duty, brought me to my exit, last out of the school and into the late summer light. She would have seen all the supporting cast come out. She would look up with faux casualness from a book by Herman Hesse at those who were devoted to the sport, the game, the competition but, sadly, not the narrative. She was probably sitting on the hood of her car, no, someone else’s car, for it was written that she would need a ride which I would compel my brother to give. Yes, and the ride to her home, surely in our part of town, would be replete with tired footballed wisdom laced with an exciting undertone of future conversations which would be on subjects which she could only imagine me expressing myself on. My brother would say nothing and would operate as an object who operated the other necessary object of our parent’s station wagon.
My showered, fresh and ready self was being called on stage. I strode down the hall , and in the empty school quiet I planned to be looking right to the horizon so my brother would call out to me by name. A duffle bag swung in nonchalance and my hand hit the door handle with a memory of the sound of cleats still singing.

And We'll Have Fun, Fun, Fun....

2008-07-07T19:54:00.000-07:00

Fun. What is this annoying invasion of our peace? I have never been an advocate of fun or a close friend of those who encourage it. While at sports academy in Connecticut I would hide in the mountain caves to avoid those grinning counselors who waded in the junior high sea arranging the next bit of fun. Most of the children liked it. I presume that they did as I was alone in my cave.
"Such stories," you say, "explain far more of you than they do fun."
I must nod and agree.
But fun is something is it not? Why do you call some things fun and others boring?

Fun is the slightly(the more slight the more fun) controlled disarray which measures successfully the borders of the overarching controls in place about you. Why do I say "measures succesfully"? Why did your mother (she who overarched most of your early fun) remind you that if you keep doing "x" you will put your eye out, it'll freeze like that, or you'll regret it all when someone gets hurt? She is measuring just how close you and your friends are to letting the disarray throw you face down in the gravel. After which, she was right, no fun.

In other words, fun is the casting off of the governance which fabricates your very humanity and descends into the gratifying abyss of unreasonable urge, after jotting a quick note to those who remain on watch to keep an eye out. We have so measured fun as a Constitutionally protected right that the great moral action regarding drunkenness is not refraining from getting plowed but the having of a designated driver. The out of control protected by the controlled.

We climb down that ladder to various rungs of fun. A game creates an arena of wild responses within its own close confine of rules. Screaming, gesticulating, falling out of your chair is all allowed but you have to do a certain thing. Games are fun because we know these 'mothers" of our moment are intending that we have fun, run amuck, work up a sweat pantomiming some word for our teammates.
Some fun lovers go further down and find that they can't have fun unless the throbbing music, dim but flashing lights, copious amounts of adult beverage all conspire to give them an event in which nothing of import, wit, or sense is uttered. These clubs are not as good a government as your mother or the game board.
We wish to savor an animal license within the wise confines of a humane liberty. I think such can be a valid grant. Pleasure can be rightly pursued when having a solid wall about you. There is a place for the passions but the degree of passion needs be met by the degree of government which protects it from exposure and vulnerability. Most will want those two things divided into 1) their abandonment to the fun and 2) someone entirely else granting the protection of the fief in which it occurs. Such is naturally expected with children who couldn't govern their own bowel movements or cook their own meals. When older it should be different. The wise man, in his fun, should never allow that it require a second agent to drive him home.

Been a Long Time, Been a Long Time...

2008-06-30T10:37:00.000-07:00

The last blog reader was slowly leaving the room. His/her hand had reached tentatively for the light switch as the persistent quiet could only be matched in future by darkness. His/her eye scanned the room looking for he/she knew not what. Was that a scratching noise? From under his/her feet it seemed to rise. Unseen heretofore was a richly aged, lichen encrusted, and dirt obscured handle and latch of which Tolkien had failed to write a complete history. A male or female hand reached down, and with knuckles whitening with the strain and shaking in fear, pulled. The gaping, black hole of the Pit hearkened to either the Crack of Doom or perhaps (he/she hoped) The Narrow Way. The smell of wormwood and souls baking in sweaty, humid, and chaffing torment rose to the nostril of the last acolyte. A damp form crawled out like a majestic sea lion and threw itself on the floor of a dryer Idaho.
"I've been to Charleston." said the heaving mass.

Das Capital

2008-06-03T17:00:00.000-07:00

A short word, if I may. Most of the time I write and design for the pleasure of it. The Amazing Missus sees boxes of textbooks, and thought, and posters, and coffee mugs not as the residue of my joy but another task crying out for completion. So sell it I must. You now can worm your way into a greater degree of affection with the Oracle (and certainly his wife) by going to the place we store our Loot and buying stuff like there were no tomorrow. I have added a link to this Mall of Oracular Stuff (bringing my approved sites up to 4) in the sidebar. The site takes PayPal, which, I assume, means I can gain American dollars from you at a distance.

Check back at that site with regularity as I hope to get more stuff produced. I hope that things like The Pitney Canon or a novel, The Book of Knights and Days might reach self publication status ere long. Maybe some bookmarks. Big Haus aprons. Feel free to clamor in the comments section for something I may have forgotten. My great futilitarian work on the sum of all human desire is a ways off (working title "Benediction: a good word on the way it is") so no clamoring for that. You may note in the comments that you await it with patience.

Völkerwanderung

2008-05-27T10:44:00.000-07:00

Pleased?
You betcha!

What you see in this picture is my family. They are perhaps the greatest set of friends a father has had in the history of Western Civ. Other fathers may feel free to think it of their own overweening storge but I, he who has post-Enlightenment Rationalism as his middle name, I have checked.

Let me introduce you to the moment. We, last weekend, had flown to the East to pay homage to my eldest child's (Lincoln Davis, second from left) success at Seton Hall Law School. We, of course, spent our days wandering Manhattan and this shot is in the graveyard of a church next to Ground Zero. It has become a shrine, not for the death and resurrection of Christ, but a shrine for the rescuers of 9/11. Nifty old church but "next to Ground Zero" is uniquely apt.

To Lincoln Davis' right (the furthest left as you look at this picture) is Graeme Stanford. He is my gift to the expansion of The Empire and serves in the U.S. Army. To Davis' left, that good looking honey is Michalangela, jazz singer of Portland, Oregon. Marching further right down the ranks we have Evan Gunn, a senior in high school who could order a beer anywhere in the United States and not get carded. In fact, Friday night we dined at Del Frisco's Rockefeller Center and the uber-confident staff offered him wine. In keeping with the theme we next meet she who will continue to be carded though aged to five decades. The wife, Leslie Ann, the Amazing Missus, fit in easily to Neuva York. I had a flare up of a heel problem and so as we marched Manhattan, I shuffled along as the grey bearded gimp to the rear of the party, head down and muttering. The Missus consequently was mistaken for my daughter.

What's not to be proud of? They are a good lookin' batch of humanity. I was proud to have shuffled along after them.

I Don't Make the Rules, I Just Apply Them.

2008-05-08T13:17:00.000-07:00

Back in my youth it was always said, "Just because you were born in a garage, it don't make you a Volkswagen." The truth bearing nature of aphorisms notwithstanding I always took that to mean (in the creedal sophistication of the Jesus Freaks) that being born in a Christian home did not make you a Christian. In fact the term "Christian home" itself is slightly silly, like those that think they feel a spirit of oppression when they drive into Utah. An institution has actual regeneracy? The mind fogs. Back to the point.
As the Baby Boom reaches past its midlife crisis and into a heightened religious sense and they pull up heaving at the near side of the Tiber or the Golden Horn, more credit is given by them to the contrary of this "saying". The adjustment of the residual evangelical faith they once held has them amend the saying thus, "Unless of course you always believed that you were a Volkswagen and committed yourself to the Chilton's manual of Volkswagen repair and subscribed rather strictly to all things relevant in the storied history of VW" Of course we cannot allow the illustration to get away from us by suggesting that this claimant to VW-ness had a Beetle and Jetta for parents at which the "please-save-my-kid-by-church-magic" set says validly, "Aha!" I pause before I say "Aha!" back at them. Don't want this to turn into a shoving match.
"Aha! Not only did I refrain from pushing the metaphor further then it could communicate but never, I repeat, never has a single Volkswagen in the history of the Cosmos been brought into being by a Beetle sharing a night of passion with a Jetta (I don't care how smokin' hot she was). So it is with Christians. The genetics and the period of incarceration make nothing of a man except perhaps peer status with the demons. But you have always believed and ..and...sola fide, faith alone.

You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe -- and shudder.
James 2:19

The catechism of the First Church of Pandemonium is solid on the doctrine of God. Not only does the creed of that institution affirm it, they individually claim the belief. How long have they believed? They can't remember a time when they did not know that this was true.

Do you want to be shown, you shallow man, that faith apart from works is barren?
James 2:20

James has been on this topic a bit by the time he gets to verses 19 & 20. He seems to think that belief that matters to God (not a dead faith) is that which has promoted an action. And what form would the action take in those that believe the claims the Jesus died for sinners?
Romans 10:8-14 has an idea.

The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart (that is, the word of faith which we preach); because, if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved. The scripture says, "No one who believes in him will be put to shame." For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and bestows his riches upon all who call upon him. For, "every one who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved." But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher?

The verbal confession includes more than saying the great creedal truths. It involves calling on the Name of the Lord. How can they call without belief? The demons believe and don't call. Is their faith not true? The Bible says that their faith is true about these things but it is silent about another belief which genetic "Christians" with them might not affirm at a level which would bring about a saving faith. They don't believe that they need to. Not sinners or not sinful enough. Regenerate from the womb, always a Christian, never unconverted. Only the sinner cries out to God, "O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?"

I John 1:8-10 If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

This is the upshot. St. Paul lets us know in Romans 7 that, yes he was born alive spiritually but as the law entered his life, sin came to life and he died. This is the death from which the work of Christ on the cross came to redeem us. The child of Christian parents is certainly benefited by the presence of the truth surrounding them but the truth is this: by the time a mind is capable of even understanding the articles of the Faith (which they will naturally believe as some naturally believe in Santa Claus) they will have fallen to the sins that come to life as they encounter the moral law. They must believe that Christ died to save sinners but they must come to also believe that they are precisely that, sinners. Those two beliefs, the need and the answer, bring about the the work of a real faith, calling on the name of the Lord to be saved. God's grace is to sinners and those who think they can just grow up knowing the truth and learning to be obedient are denying that grace.

I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification were through the law,
then Christ died to no purpose.
Galatians 2:21

Have I then become your enemy by telling you the truth?
Galatians 4:16

This persuasion is not from him who calls you.
Galatians 5:8

Hauskeeping

2008-05-05T11:16:00.000-07:00

Do you want to understand The Big Haus Society?
Go here.
Do you want to help offer The Big Haus to others?
Go here.
Do you want to visit The Big Haus to gain what it is we offer?
Go here.

ART, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY, AND FAITH
At the Big Haus,
It's the Thought That Counts.

Pastoral Bestiary

2008-05-01T19:17:00.000-07:00

I ran across this old cartoon today cleaning out my files.

All the Best People Will be There

2008-04-25T11:19:00.000-07:00

All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
Ecclesiastes 1:8

That said, The Male Box is throwing an arts extravaganza tonight and tomorrow. I will have some unsatisfying visuals hung in their gallery and the Amazing Missus will be belting out sounds that fill not thine ears mid-Friday nite.

I will be moving the keyboard later this afternoon.
Full of weariness? You betcher!
Utter it? Watch my dust.

"God Willing"

2008-04-24T09:42:00.000-07:00

The pious are those who take serious measure of the gods and place themselves accurately in that measure. In other words the theism of the righteous is both referential and reverential. What is your reference for the Living God? Remember that the rest of us can tell the quality of your reference by the pronounced quality of your reverence. "The God Who Made Heaven and Earth" is either just a verbal reference with equivalent verbal (and verbal only) reverence or it is how your categories and personal governmental theory has found Him placed.

The squishy melodies affirming "My God is an awesome God" sees impiety from many of the lives of the voices who sing it. The need is not only that the reference be true (He is Awesome) and that the reference be where His name appears in the index of Christian thought (God, one each, triune, awe inspiring) but where He appears as highest in the List of Lords each man recognizes and wills to govern himself. Again, piety is a personal thing and impiety is as well. It is the government of circumstantial passion that makes some bozo sing the word "awesome" juxtaposed with the Name of God fervently in one place, and in another, find that the Name is companion to "dammit".

"My brethren, it ought not be so."

The Oracle: Quit relying on the church for your reference to God. When it is distant and "endlessly repeated" you will feel that level of piety (in other words, none, or what passes for piety but is really some gaseous aesthetic brought on by Handel and Gothic architecture). Bow the knee when you are not shielded behind the force field of Christendom.

Bow your knee.

You are certainly

not bright enough

to run your own morality.

You need a god.

The Insult that is Sin

2008-04-22T09:51:00.000-07:00

Hmmm.... Let me see.....stuff that is important.
If man is created for the potential of autonomously chosen pursuit, obedience, and worship of He who created him, then the quality we call sin is perhaps not best argued at the level of "don't do that or this". Sin (capitalized not just because it begins the sentence) is all about your personal theory of governance. The question "who is in charge here?" asked of just about everyone is easily answered by the casual tapping of their own chest. Another question comes charging up. "How is that working out for you?" Admit it, you are lousy at Life. You are not smart enough and neither is Dr. Phil. Oh yeah... and then you die. Dumb as a stump and worm feed ere long. God has given you feelings and perceptions and hopes and fears punctuated by mortal and immortal death. With that lineup He expects you would consider taking His resume, looking over His qualities for running the job to which you promoted yourself. Allowing that God is the wisest guide, Righteousness is the wisest governance of all pains and pleasures. Sin will actually be the governance that follows, not wisdom, but the folly of urge. Run to pleasure (be it drink, sex, etc.), retreat from pain (fear, cowardice, dishonesty, etc.) and nothing has governed, nothing has ruled but passion, wanting what promotes itself in Desire. To want without will is not just evil but bestial as well. The Christian, living in the light of God's governance is not just holy but humane.

Let me give you some help.

Sin is not a pattern of icky crimes but shallow ones. It is not the biology of sex that makes it bad in various circumstances but the variety of the circumstance. In fact folks are pleased with being taboo or seamy or sordid about their sin. Only a grade schooler will fall for the "icky" spit swapping barrier to kissing. Who shall I blame for this error in assessment? The church will do just fine. Augustine held that sex was even sinful in marriage. John Paul II suggested that lust was wrong even within marriage. They and their ilk built and sustained the Manichean Icky School of Sin and the sinner is oddly happy to graduate from it. Pleasure can trump icky in a heartbeat, in fact icky makes sin more pleasing still. But Sin is not the icky. Sin is the white trash level of confidence that you are capable to rule the monstrous joy of sex. A man looks a woman not his wife, or the teens park the car at the scenic overlook, or the pederast cruises the chat rooms, and each will say (to maintain the metaphor of how trashy are your choices) "Here, hold my beer and watch this."

The Chronicles of the Oracle

2008-04-03T13:20:00.000-07:00

My abject apologies for failing to even post the mundanities of my life. You ought understand that local oracular duties take precedence over the far flung of more hyper spaces. Big thoughts were thunk, you can be sure. Vortices of conversational epiphany lay scattered like jetsam cross the hardwood floors of Big Haus. Young men tug at their forelock as they passed the manse and they murmur a slight but fervent prayer that they would grow up big and strong of mind.

Coming out of Easter things have gone from busy to bustin' loose. Davis was here for the holiday which has its own soul cleansing bout of rigorous thought. We had a church breakfast that day, then church itself, after which we invited everyone over (totaling 45 persons) for luncheon at the Haus. We then had a couple from California visit for a few days as they spied out the land. I spent that week whipping up interest and materials for The Mojo Oracles. It had a good turnout on Saturday (17 male minds awash in futility and food). The three days before the Mojo we added to the family by entertaining and welcoming cousins (1 real, 2 step) from Canada that I did not know that I had. Nice people. Add to the general hoorah Leslie's Bella "Let's look at the score from the Jazz Festival" meeting and her band practicing and that brings us to this week. Starting Monday I have been laboring to create a notebook for a conference I am doing tomorrow in Colorado (Leslie and I leave at 3;30 tomorrow a.m.). We get back Sunday night late and have to be ready Monday morning first period to teach the philosophy of Manners (The Word of a Gentleman and the Way of a Lady) at Montrose Academy. That goes all week winding up with a banquet at the Big Haus on Saturday with Leslie Wilson and Heartless performing an evening concert at the Nuart Theater after. That means I had to fabricate the textbooks for that week this week along with the other prep. My brain has started to effervesce. All I can manage for the fans of Clan MacEvan is this recounting. That and ask for your prayers that we might survive. I am trying also to get out a fundraising brochure for the ministry here. It is done but needs to be printed and mailed. Some of you will see it. If you think you might not be on our mailing list and would like to be sure that a Big Haus shakedown for support reaches you, put a comment to that effect and I will let you know how to safely get us your address.

We think we might have a free weekend in a couple of weeks. I suppose that could change. Dang free will.

An Oracle for Wednesday

2008-03-19T11:43:00.000-07:00

Peace is not a thing but a reaction to Order. The kind of Peace gained by Order is related to the arena; if emotional, domestic, military, or spiritual.
Order the realm and gain the Peace. If you cannot master the realms of life, find a master who can.

The degree to which you successfully govern your Self and Circumstance defines your Dignity and what Honors are requisite to it.
We are Humane to the degree we govern ourselves, Civilized to the degree we are governed in an ordered society, and Noble to the degree we are of governing service to it.
We are Pious to the degree we are governed from On High.

Went Down to the River (DaDaan da Duh)

2008-03-17T11:03:00.001-07:00

So we went down to see my baby, Michal Angela, as she has labored to become a working singer in the Portland, Oregon jazz scene. We wanted to go out on the town with her in this professional moment.

First pic: Mike getting her performance groove on.

Second: Pick out the 50 year old.

Third: Mike and the Blessed, (our "second daughter").

Fourth pic: Jake and Bethany Calene came out for the gig (which was out in McMinnville, Oregon at the NW Wine Bar.)

Next few: Mike singing with her pianist, and recording studio owner, Jonathan Swanson (he is dang good). The bass player is some old guy who sat in but Michal has played with his son and grandson who are also bass players.

Art Shot at the end (meaning by that it was out of focus and was run through some PhotoShop filters): Leslie got to sing a couple of numbers at the end of the evening.

All Souls Update

2008-03-03T11:25:00.000-08:00

We have closed on the new home for All Souls.
This is a great blessing that our fellowship only has because our God is greater than our financial ability.

Pray for us as we learn the joys and sorrows of property.

photo: Tim Tate

Yes, Yes, Yes, Oh Yes!

2008-02-28T09:55:00.001-08:00

Are you a Christian man?
When it come to understanding women and your emotions regarding women are you as dumb as a stump?
When it comes to being a man do you default to "behaving badly"?
Did you read "Wild at Heart" and like it?
You need help.

Finally...
... after two years...
...and a tour of the subcontinent...
THE MOJO ORACLES
March 29, 2008

Seminar Schedule: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
First Session: THE SUM OF ALL DESIRE
Are there basic reasons for everything every man does? The first session explores the claim that we are all after something simply obvious. It is the underpinning of a rationally sound pursuit of being a man.
Sandwich lunch — Noon
Second Session: HIERARCHY & SUBLIMITY
As the prerequisite to honour and dignity, a philosophy of position has been lost in modern America. Regaining that mode of thought is essential to becoming the gentleman.
15 minute break
Third Session: NOBLESSE OBLIGE & THE SEVERITIES
The more masculine virtues of Honour, Dignity, Integrity, and Gravity are the oft ignored virtues, and are not friendly to the modern egalitarian outlook.
15 minute break
Fourth Session: THE MOJO
The Biblical understanding of the Attraction called “Woman” and the benefits of that understanding in resisting temptation and winning a wife.
15 minute break
Fifth Session: The Word of A GENTLEMAN
Gathered from the teachings of that penultimate gentleman, Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield,
and the Book of the Courtier by Count Balthazar Castiglione.
1 hour break

Roast Beast Dinner— 7:00
Attire: Casual
with after dinner
CIGARS

FIN — 10 p.m.

It costs $50.

If you would like to attend click here to reach a PDF of the brochure and registration.

For the Philistine

2008-02-13T20:48:00.001-08:00

A couple of posts back I put up a picture of the house across the corner from ours, to which Philistine asked if the Big Haus had mutated into something he did not remember. His memory had to stretch over two decades into the humbler times when he and I spread polyurethane on the oaken floors of the dining room...

...in this,...
(thunder and numinous light blinds us momentarily)

...the Big Haus.

The Conscience of Art

2008-02-13T08:54:00.000-08:00

With such a title one would half expect some gasbag arranging an event o'erwhelmed with artistes, while standing under, around, between articles and banners with the word "Darfur" emblazoned thereon. There is something about the claimants to art, who, facing doubts and questions rightly posed about their actual gifts, must prove that they have the soul of an artist. A car mechanic would never think of traveling to some sandy place to walk their artificially tanned arse through starving crowds while mentally composing their U.N. testimony. Yep, mechanics can't do that. And, nope, I am not talking about this conscience posing as an artistic soul leaking out of fleshly finite containers due to over filling (but I did enjoy describing it).
Each part of any art betrays that it is art by this function of conscience. Like the conscience that bothers you when you lie to you friends, this conscience is "with (con) knowledge (science). When any portion (a tone, a color, a shape, a placement, a timing) shows that its participation is with knowledge of the other participants, art's conscience has been expressed.
I used to say the parts of arts functioned "in agreement" but, though that explains a lot of successful works (if not most) I think that parts in disagreement can be valid if that disagreement shows knowledge of the other (rather than mere chaos). Art has a conscience. It wrestles across a medium in or on which the artist shows that the various parts can nod politely, rudely, or amorously at the others,... but they will nod.

We've had Some Snow this Year

2008-02-12T13:41:00.001-08:00

Credit where Credit is Due

2008-02-11T13:50:00.000-08:00

It is apparent that the faith of a man (his coming to a belief regarding the Gospel) is the thing which God asks to see and subsequently graces the man of faith unto salvation. Some would say that if a man's faith is of himself it is a work and as a work cannot save. But what would keep it from being his work? The answer comes that God gives him the faith as well as the grace.
I ask (as a humble seeker after truth) on what basis was that removal of credit? I answer (because this is a blog and not a forum) that the appeal of the credit removal is our fully functional common sense. It is based on the fundamental nature of justice stated thusly: The agent responsible (and thereby credited) is the agent causal to the degree causal. If God is 100% causal to a man's faith, God is 100% to be credited and man can claim 0%. I believe that is fair, don't you?

But hold on! But wait a dang minute!

Those that claim such a "who do believe, me or your own lyin' eyes" explanation for the source of faith are doing so to protect a broader system in which God is exhaustively sovereign. In such a view, all things, from monad to mood to movements of the heavens, are decreed by God and His will is 100% and no other thing contributes an iota of autonomous causality.
If that is so, and for the sake of taking from a man his own faith, supporters of this broader view have assented to the definition of justice, how is it that any works (denied as a source of salvation) can be works at all? How is it man receives 100% credit for his sins although he is 0% causal? If a man is credited for one, why not the other? If sins are credited because they look like they are done in the here and now by the man willing them and doing them, why not his faith which looked like he had done actually within himself?

I don't ask that that my brothers in Christ who hold such a notion abandon their system of sovereignty but that they admit to proposing a sophistry regarding faith. Its strength as an argument is based on an idea of justice to which they do not subscribe.

On Story

2008-02-04T15:57:00.000-08:00

In any narrative laid out before us, we are drawn to inhabit varying degrees of audience-ness. On one pole, that of entirely audience, are those which watch, read or listen to the story from without. They do not identify with any aspect of the story. That is extremely disconnected to what stories involve and reflects on the story (if it managed to represent nothing that is "true" to us) or on the audience (who lives as a practical solipsist). One the other pole is the complete identification with the story. This characteristic in ourselves finds us taking a role in the story like some plain, intellectually self gratifying female of perpetual singleness finding that she breathes the very atman of Elizabeth Bennett. Again this reflects either on the quality of the story or its audience.
The first pole mentioned is pointless to story as stories seek to convey and nothing was conveyed. It was just some thing, an article, like a rock, but a rock has no intention of communication. The second or other pole matters a great deal. The actualness of the story, its truth regarding objective truth, calls to everyone to align themselves truly to the parts they ought. There are women just like Elizabeth Bennett and they should see themselves in her. Tragically there are more Mr. Collins than those who recognize it and equally tragic, fewer Mr Darcys than the actual Elizabeths would like.
But for all this I think about the Gospel. The narrative told us by God is that we are sinners, every man jack of us, and as sinners damned eternally. Now the above description of audience applies. Within Christendom (not Christianity) there are many who see the narrative of God's salvific purpose without seeing their participation in the story. They may advance the story. They may say the story is true. Certainly they, in this advocacy of the story (remember they inhabit Christendom), are not at the first polar extreme. They have heard the story with the attendance and enjoyment of a Stars Wars fan. They have willfully suspended their disbelief and they pretend that the story is true and the equally pretend (for the serious fans) that they are like one or more of the characters. While at a Christian church or conference or concert they participate in the story with the back or nature of their mind ready to realize, on leaving the "theater", that they are not Han Solo. Christianity asks for something more. It tells a story that we are not supposed to enjoy temporarily as if only meeting it with story and audience clearly distinct. It tells a story that is about us. We don't just find that we are "like" a character in it, we "are" a character in it. Those sinners it speaks of are all of us who hear it. To fail in this identification is to fail to have a faith that will beseech God for forgiveness of Our Sins.

The great thing, if we wish to visit our Jane Austen motif again, is that once we discover that we are, actually are, Elizabeth Bennett we know that the story has promised Mr Darcy. We are the sinners in the story of the Gospel and Jesus Christ has died for us.

Can I Get A Witness?

2008-01-28T08:41:00.000-08:00

As we know from countless Christian weddings Love is defined in I Corinthians 13. Our souls recoil in horror and our moral rectitude becomes questionable, since desiring to choke the life out of any minister who allows it is probably questionable. Our eyes bug out as the right reverend doesn't even bother reconciling the idea that while agape love is not jealous, there is a natural jealousy of erotic love. But wedding tradition will have its way with us,so let's make do.
In that passage we find a lot of what love is not but two words describing what Love is.
“Love is patient and kind.”
Now, please be patient with me for a bit.

It is not just that agape love and romantic love are not the same thing. In a wedding we are bound to find, not one or the other, but four kinds of Love. Saint Clive gave his remarkable Four Talks on them and the book version is worthy of your time. I had my future wife listen to his talk on Eros back in 1976 and we have now been married over 29 years. This is magical stuff. Pay attention.

At a wedding Eros or Romantic love is a bit obvious. The bride is ramped up to an unusual state of hotness. The music swells. The flowers run riot and smiles bedeck whomever with a faint whiff of sexuality. The ritual is festooned with unnatural aristocratic decorations and people move in paths they will never move again, because they are middle class. It is the honor that Eros receives from us. All of the peripheral universe disappears and the couple becomes the conclusion of the "most important romantic novel ever written".
The presence of friendship or Philia is probably more modern and it is a gift for which modernity should be blessed. In courtship/patriarchal societies of the past, the wise guidance of a certain number of goats struck a chord with the Fathers and, TA DA, a marriage! We allow friendships to develop and we like it more when a friendship has developed before vows are taken, just as we prefer that Eros develop before vows. At least Jacob wished it with Leah.
Moving on to Storge or Family love, a wedding is almost primarily this love. If nothing else, two families are joined, one family is made and "all their worldly goods" are cross given and endowed.
Much more can be made of this list of loves but let it suffice to say that these three are not, by Pauline definition, that which is "patient and kind".
What he defined, is Agape or Charity. We must now apply our way to some meaning.
What we see at a wedding, and as a congregation we witness, are the vows taken to so love in this fourfold way. "I swear," you say, "to be lover, family, friend, and neighbor regardless of our fate."
Now this is a pretty big deal. Possibly bigger than you think.
As many of you know, all Christian ethics derive from Love. Those that don't, give me a call.
Romans 12:8-10
Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. The commandments, "You shall not commit adultery, You shall not kill, You shall not steal, You shall not covet," and any other commandment, are summed up in this sentence, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.
If four loves are being vowed at a wedding, our witness of those vows, in varying ways, involves us too.
A bridal couple is a picture of us all and so we don’t just witness, we participate.
While many Christian weddings misapply the I Corinthians 13 passage, as many, gladly and correctly apply the Ephesians 5 idea that they are a metaphor of Christian charity, the patient and kind love. They are to be seen ultimately as Christ and his church and Christ giving himself up for her as the penguin-suited groom is to give himself up for the waxed and buffed bride. You, sitting in pew twelve, are called to witness both the mundane and the transcendent wedding. The "patience and kindness" that the couple vow to start giving each other is that which you all must witness, value and enjoy. You sat there and witnessed a monumental metaphor and it wasn't about them but about you and between you all and each.
Witnessing wedding agape is to witness where you stand morally, because you witnessed a picture of Christ and His redemption. Lots of portent there, my friend.

But the Romantic Love and Friendship Love that they have is private. Yes, private but objectively there or not and witnessed as there or not. The congregation does not participate actually or metaphorically but witnesses them as those who want its best expressed in them, and by its lessons, in you.

The Family Love is also all around on the wedding day. Each family is donating parts of themselves for this new family unit. The metaphor in Ephesians 5 is so dynamic and Christ-centered that the demonstration of it in the couple's attachment, service, and obedience is hard to move past. But the family they primarily but collaterally make, it too is a metaphor, and an important one.
Matthew 12:46-50
While he was still speaking to the people, behold, his mother and his brothers stood outside, asking to speak to him. But he replied to the man who told him, "Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?" And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother."
If the couple exchanging vows have both passed from Death to Life, their creation of family calls out to the congregation to value the real family of the kingdom of Heaven and not just the new "Mr. and Mrs." in their home.

Weddings are not like another floor show, which for the cover charge of acquaintance and a gift, we can attend. They speak to and of us. What we witness is a set of grand loves which all touch us with some necessity. What we see we only see at perhaps 20-30 weddings in our lifetimes and, (this is of some moment), only for you lifetime.
The vows show us that this lesson is before our eyes only temporarily.
“till death do us part”
Christ agrees.
In Matthew 22:29-30
But Jesus answered them, "You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.

This message is for both you and and any besotted, charming couple standing before the vicar.
The wedding is the beginning of a lesson from God, witnessed by you all and vowed by the celebrants.
It is a lesson that best be learned for it ends for us all one day.
Matthew 22:36-39
"Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?" And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

The life of complete holiness is preached at every wedding across the land.
The love on display on any wedding day seeks not its own but seeks its God above and seeks, in the believers, its family, and in all, its neighbor.

Who Are You?

2008-01-18T13:30:00.000-08:00

Definitions, as I have pointed out before, are different than Circumstances. For the sinner, it is of some moment and relief that Christianity changes the definition of a man rather than his circumstance. The rest of the world's religions (and much of Christendom) stress the religious circumstances of the life they recommend. The New Covenant has made a man's nature different. He is redefined. Whatever his circumstance, Jew or Gentile, male or female, slave or free, his definition has shifted and he is now filled with the Holy Spirit. This is necessary to even call yourself a Christian for "you are not in the flesh, you are in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Any one who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him." Romans 8:9

Many churches give a list of circumstances (from wet the baby to walk the aisle) perhaps because the circumstances of a Christian's life do change. You can't change the definition of something without it changing the world the new being inhabits. This will be so much that, as St. James says "I, by my works, will show you my faith." He didn't say "I will create my faith."

The worldly mind takes this continuum between who you are and what you do and switches where the definition resides. "I'll make a faith," says he, " from my ritual to moral to cultural deeds and it will be the biggest, grandest Christian faith you ever did see." He thinks that the definition is made by the circumstances not vice versa. He looks at the change described by the apostles and falls into the same slavery that he came out of.

If a man is defined as a featherless biped and believes wholeheartedly that that circumstance is what makes him a man, two errors are eventual. One, a plucked chicken is a man and, two, if he loses a leg, he lost his humanity.
Applied, we see that someone who insists that a Christian will be defined by x-ritual observance and by x-cultural condition, the church will soon (and has been) cumbered with those who meet the external definition who have not Christ and some who have Christ will be left wondering, should they lose access to x-ritual, if they are Christians.

The Christ says, "You must be born again."
Let Christ make a new man of you.
"whereas the aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and sincere faith." I Timothy 1:5

A Father's Good on Christmas Day

2007-12-27T12:10:00.001-08:00

Here lie, in the sanctum sanctorum of Big Haus (where the Oracle receives his supplicants), the offspring of greatness. Cradled by leathern couch, feet draped on leathern hassock, sit the four who will carry Clan MacEvan into a dark future.

In that dark tomorrow:
One is to be a lawyer.
One is to be a jazz singer.
One is to be soldier.
One is to be a philosopher.

All are Christians with faithful effect for the Kingdom of Heaven. What better Christmas gift could I be given?

A Mother's Good Example on Christmas Day

2007-12-27T11:24:00.000-08:00

There are six of us in Clan MacEvan. In past years the Christmas table was always enjoyed by a wider array of folk than our mere six. The Amazing Missus, in those past years, always put on a spread that set new standards for the Northwest Regional Hostette AAA Division.

But something different happened this year. We decided, what with 3 of our 6 returning from points elsewhere, we would just have MacEvans at table. A simpler circumstance with that MacEvan futilitarian ease and comfortable, non competitive dining.

We found out that it never had been competitive for the Amazing Missus. It is who she is. Her family will be served at the level of guests.
Just look at that table.

Keeping it Simple

2007-12-17T14:44:00.000-08:00

This last Sunday I preached on why some unbelievers, in spite of being intelligent, hearing, and even understanding, don't turn to God and cry out for salvation, while others in the same state do.
Simple question.
Some theological persuasions make it more difficult and raise new questions (about the goodness of God) by their handling of such a simplicity. I forgive them as they are trapped by an anthropology that forces them into complexity.

I said it was a simple question.
It has a simple answer.
Why don't they repent?
They don't want to.
My anthropology has been mentioned on this blog before. The central task of man is to resolve the nature of feeling. He must govern it into some satisfactory semblance of peace. He chases after his lusts, moderates them and minimizes his pains. He develops his understanding and justifies his action. He knows that he has been given the first draft in the task of governance. He soon finds that he must allow others to share in the governance for he, alone, could not arrange life well enough. He collects into cities and solves thereby some of his needs. They together develop economics and armies and laws. We all know what we are about in this regard. Everything we do is answering the question of who is "lord" over "what".
Enter the God, the God who made Heaven and Earth.
He says, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved."
He is asking for everyman to make a crucial grant of lordship and man guards that privilege very closely. In addressing the unbelief of the Jews in Romans 6, St. Paul quotes Isaiah 65.
I spread out my hands all the day
to a rebellious people,
who walk in a way that is not good,
following their own devices;
3 a people who provoke me
to my face continually,
sacrificing in gardens
and burning incense upon bricks;
4 who sit in tombs,
and spend the night in secret places;
who eat swine's flesh,
and broth of abominable things is in their vessels;
5 who say, "Keep to yourself,
do not come near me, for I am set apart from you."

Note the last line of verse 2.
It is their own devices they follow. They want to arrange their lives their way for what they perceive will be an adequate peace.
And verse 5 is their conclusion.
Their every hope is to have a life following the oft remarked key of conservative politics.
"The government that governs least governs best."
Man's own passion, their own feeling, their own way is the single explanation for the wide variety of sin in this world.
As Christ quotes Isaiah 6 in Matthew 13:15
"For this people's heart has grown dull,
and their ears are heavy of hearing,
and their eyes they have closed,
lest they should perceive with their eyes,
and hear with their ears,
and understand with their heart,
and turn for me to heal them.'"
They choose to be blind. They do not honor God as God or give Him thanks.
They would like to be healed (it is our primary need) but they don't want God to do it.
They would be the "master of their own fate, the captain of their own soul" no longer if they bowed the knee. They are no different from the wingnut that refuses to get a social security card, lives in a single wide in Montana and doesn't pay his taxes. He thinks he is man enough to command that difficult task called the human life.
He isn't that smart and neither are we.
While we may be more sensible in our willingness to absorb a loss of individual governance because more power than we have is necessary to fight a war, print legal tender, and maintain sewer lines. We allowed for it and became citizens of it because we knew we needed something we could not individually access and that this fraternity or overlord provided.
God has asked for something more directly about and within us than a city's infrastructure can offer. He has asked to rule our passions directly. This is the seat and motivation of all our pursuits. It is what we feel, both painful and pleasurable. He will have nothing less from us than authority over the arrangement of our feeling. Others, like cult leaders or megalomaniacs and even Satan of Christ, have asked for this control but only a God can provide a moral governance validly. It is a big submission and it must be made and must be made correctly. Heaven knows we need it. He who refuses to submit to God thinks he can make a "good" that is good enough.

The Heavens and the Earth are a monarchy.
Jesus Christ is King and Lord.
The peasants are, well, peasants.
They look on the claim of Christ and sound like the mud farmer in Monty Python.

Man: Come and see the violence inherent in the system! HELP, HELP, I'M BEING REPRESSED!
Arthur: Bloody PEASANT!
Man: Oh, what a giveaway! Did'j'hear that, did'j'hear that, eh? That's what I'm all about! Did you see 'im repressing me? You saw it, didn't you?!

Parishioners, Congregants, Occasionals, & the Curious

2007-12-06T15:05:00.000-08:00

This Sunday, December 9, 2007
All Souls Christian Church
will meet at its new building
(217 E. 6th, Moscow, Idaho
and it looks like the church pictured below)

Regular time: 9:30 A.M.

Tell everyone that you know who might accidentally go to the American Legion Cabin and think that despite my views on the Rapture, it happened anyway.

Come ready to be Very Thankful!
signed, The Bish

Praise God From Whom All Blessings

2007-12-05T11:07:00.001-08:00

Blessings!

2007-11-22T10:13:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving Prayer

Rendered words will to Thee, on knees before,
Call blessings down on us from blessedness
On all the temptings, Thine, we do adore
But hold as bliss in brief possessedness.
O, Giving One, Thy name on high be praised,
Thou, us, hast given surfeit, rich with wine
Not want. Here satisfacted hands are raised
To call this Annum’s bountied harvest Thine.
And families all, beneath thy heaven sing
Of faithfulness to such as mortal clay.
Your eyes and ears patrol the earth to bring
Our humbly proffered plea to thee today.
Before Thy throne we lift the goodly year
May Thy great goodness bless today with cheer.

by Evan Wilson

I Got Me A Hat!

2007-11-19T11:43:00.001-08:00

I have been in many arguments involving the compelling wonders of Open Theism and its Promethean carriage of light to the tired darkness of determinism. I have left the half dead khaki clad forms of many a young turk crying for mercy on my library floor.

But then, on the wings of the U.S. Mail came a sign, a portent. I sat there stunned. All my human pride gathered in puddles doubly wet with my tears of shocked clarity about deterministic..um... stuff. The postal service winged thing claimed to be a demonstration, obviously, of decree.

What's the picture for? Hold on, hold on! I'm getting to that.

St. Joe of Mikler camest to town some years gone. Since he had known and been taught by an old friend of mine (who had recommended and warned St. Joe of me), it necessitated that we meet. Meet we did at Bucers one night. Short swords were drawn, blood was spilt, and the emblematic khakis were ruined. After Joe got out of hospital a friendliness to those of heterodox opinion had grown. In due course this monk of Miklerburg, this anchorite of Orlando graduated and moved back to the spiritual and moral wilderness that is Florida. One day he walked into a skate shop and there, the decrees insisted, was a hat. Not just any hat but a hat that could turn the Oracle from his free willin' ways. I know you can't read it but emblazoned thereon, for all the world as unanswerable as Gideon's fleece, it says "First Church of Evans". If this is from the hands of Providence may I suggest that they should cast their graphics department into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing. St. Joe sent it unto me with a warning to mend my ways. I have submitted (in insincere external gesture without any true repentance) since Floridian decrees are hard to resist. I wore it to church.

May I say this is the best argument I have ever heard from a Calvinist?

Yes, that is as good as it gets.

And I got a hat.

One up for the Open Theists!

Are You a Compelling Argument?

2007-11-16T11:12:00.000-08:00

In two conversations recently a certain thought has crossed my mind. That thought involves what passes as an compelling apologia for the Faith.
For some, the authority of the Church, with its various levels of priestcraft and tradition, whether it be ancient or new-fangled, is the proof offered. It is the proof of an insistent, bigger voice which, while not God Himself, makes the hearer feel sufficiently dependent and small.
For others it is the philosophic/historic/debate driven proof that evolution is wrong, God exists, the Flood happened, etc. etc.. This is the most popular apologia and where, if you buy a book on apologetics, you will find yourself immersed.
Some find that the Fake is sufficient to prove the Faith to themselves and to others. This involves stories easily checked on Snopes.com which everyone (everyone with a modicum of smarts) knows are a fraud, but the desire to believe that Life is this way, creates the offering of a lie in exchange for a "willful suspension of disbelief". It is an apologia of "I really want this kind of thing to be true and you told me it was". I have been in embarrassing conversations with college educated Christians sharing tales where only my breeding as a gentleman kept me from informing them in front of their wife and offspring that they, yes they, had managed to make the word "retard" a necessary and helpful part of my vocabulary.
Rarely, and this is my thought in these recent conversations, are the apologies of the Authority of the Church, the Debate on Facts and Ideas, or the Born Fools Believing Abject Lies any match for the Grand Battle between Sin and Righteousness. Catechize your kid, wrap their reading up in Philip Johnson and Josh McDowell, and send them off to Creation concerts where they can hear the latest of Christian mythologies and when they go off to college, what do you know?, they tube it. Sin seems fully capable to trump everything but actual Righteousness. Why not prove the Faith by proving in your life what the Faith was supposed to do? That a lot of people have believed it, or that it is true, or that it even excites rumours is no replacement for it working. I guess it is easier for most (thinking their doing Our God a favor) to read Michael Behe or C.S. Lewis and spout a regurgitated argument than it is to be holy and point your child (ah, there's the rub) or the nonbeliever that knows you well, at your life. Wouldn't it be nice if the Grand Victory of Christ over Sin at the Cross had some practical evidence?
Of course its true, look at what it has done for me!