fake and fakery

This is a fake Ferrari P4 made in Thailand. It makes me ask what possess someone to buy an under-powered fake, made in a back street factory in Thailand. Image only goes so far, because it doesn't drive like one and certainly isn't reliable or safe. One test drive would reveal it as lacking and fake.

Years ago my friends Caroline and Nigel got married and while they were on honeymoon I got to babysit Caroline's new cello. About a year old and a winner in competition I expected great things from it. As a cellist, I got to compare the sound and playability of my own battered 1913 French Hawkes with this new winning instrument. But in the playing I realized that my cracked scarred beauty (see earlier post here) and the great new instrument were comparable.

How about your spiritual practices? I've tried most of the classical spiritual disciplines over the years. The easiest I have kept as part of my regular practice and the difficult ones I occasionally try again. But you can only find the real by working at it. How do you find the real life? Well you find truth and reality in the living out of life with the disciplines, i.e. instead of keeping them separate, they form your life.

Addicted to information

Internet addiction is not manifesting itself as an 'urge'. It's more than that. It's a deep 'craving'. They (the addicts) are just like anyone else who is addicted to coffee, exercise, or talking on their cellular phone. ... Sufferers ... may experience loss of sleep, anxiety when not online, isolation from family and peer groups, loss of work, and periods of deep depression. Dr Pinhas Dannon

Last year group proposed video game addiction be listed as a mental disorder in the American Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, a guide used by the American Psychiatric Association in diagnosing mental illness, but they failed.

Strangely I think internet is a different to my former caffeine addiction. Dr Irvine Biederman notes that new knowledge and perhaps continuing new knowledge which is fixed in a moment of comprehension triggers a biochemical cascade that rewards the brain with a shot of natural opium-like substances. I discovered this on Lifehacker recently but then found it in a public release dated 20 June 2006. It took at least 20 months to filter from American Scientist (Press release here) to The Wall Street Journal (here) to lifehacker (here). Thus compulsive internet surfing is feeding our information addiction or habit. I wonder how about blogging?

That just leaves one question. How come people don't get addicted to the spiritual disciplines in this way?

Cleansed by fire

Every so often I have to catch up with my Google Reader account and every so often instead of writing something and storing for posting later I have to post it.

When I read the real blogs of real people in real situations, my own situation and issues seems almost fake when forced into a reality beyond me. Joey at Missions and Theology teaches and works in South East Asia. He and his wife recently adopted Thin Yannat a little girl earlier kidnapped in another harrowing episode. But this episode stunned me. (read it here)

We didn’t have the chance to know his name. We only know him as Thin Yannat’s father. He was a living skeleton—with sunken eyes and protruding bones. He was suffering from AIDS. ...

The Pastor refused to minister to a dying man and it made us angry. Narlin and I were their teachers and we were supposed to be responsible for teaching these local pastors about ministering to the dying people. However, we unbalancedly focused on Biblical studies in expense of teaching them practical theology. The incident demonstrates the failure of imbalance teaching. What good is biblical knowledge when you cannot minister to the people in a time they badly needed it? Perhaps we wept because we failed to teach these people. ...

What are we going to do with the dead body of an illegal migrant who died of AIDS...?

I'm ashamed of my own struggles, ashamed of the media and that it focuses on a failing stock market: The failure of vast corporations to make their predicted profits. I am ashamed when I read about Thin Yannat a little girl of an illegal migrant. This takes even greater focus when in my D.min where I've been working on units about theological reflection and practical theology. What is all this enterprise of academia about unless it deals with a tangible reality? This afternoon my assistant and co-worker Carny in my English Conversation class drew a card which asked What would you do if you had a magic wand? She simply said Abolish poverty! That was both familiar and also rattled my world. What's my or your life all about? Is it real and authentic? Does it touch tangible reality?

The last week or so I spent time with Proverbs 30. I'd never sat with it before, never contemplated nor studied it. It starts "I am weary, O God " and repeats it. "Surely I am too stupid ..." Then it moves on to say "Two things I ask of you ... remove far from me falsehood and lying. Give me neither poverty nor riches, feed me with the food that I need." I wrestled with my tangled reality as I wondered about my own financial support raising and I wrote in my journal " I do feel stupid and frustrated at the same time!"

Whoever loves money never has money enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income. This too is meaningless. As goods increase, so do those who consume them. And what benefit are they to the owner except to feast his eyes on them? ... Naked a man comes from his mother's womb, and as he comes, so he departs. He takes nothing from his labor that he can carry in his hand. Ecclesiastes 5:10-11, 15

Beauty and Holiness

Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God—but only he who sees takes off his shoes Elizabeth Barrett Browning

In a recent interview (details here) Leigh McLeroy is recored as saying

Both beauty and holiness are “other than.” In their “otherness” they have the ability to transport and transform. They move and change us, evoking in us powerful response. When the prophet Isaiah saw his breathtakingly beautiful vision of the Lord’s holiness he was moved to say “Woe is me!” and then his guilt was removed and his sin atoned for with a searing hot coal. Thus transformed, he enlisted in the Holy One’s great cause by saying “Here am I. Send me!”

I've been wrestling with similar concepts how the aesthetic is not the same as the spiritual. They share a similarity in a sense of transcendence but they are not the same. Sadly my education Phd student discussion partner is leaving to return to his home country. Our conversations have revealed for me this exact issue. But I find myself wanting clarification from McLeroy. Beauty and the sublime follow very similar paths but I think only holiness disappears off on to the horizon, off to the Holy One. McLeroy sort of says this when he quotes the late Pope John Paul II who called beauty “a key to mystery and a call to transcendence. It is an invitation to savor life and to dream of the future. That is why the beauty of created things can never fully satisfy. It stirs that hidden nostalgia for God.”

No longer will Jacob be ashamed; no longer will their faces grow pale. When they see among them their children, the work of my hands, they will keep my name holy; they will acknowledge the holiness of the Holy One of Jacob, and will stand in awe of the God of Israel.
Is 29:22-23