The Evantine Order for the Very Calm Life: Rule Two

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

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.

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

She did what????

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....

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!

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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!

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

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

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?

"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

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.