matthew

I've been reading through the gospel of Matthew with group lately, and here are some of my thoughts and comments on little parts of it.

"So if you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift" (5:23-24).

Most of the time when I hear people talking about these verses, it's in the context of worship services. In that scenario, it means that if you come to worship and are mad at someone, you should talk to them before you worship. I don't think that's what it's getting at though. For one thing, I think it has to be read in light of the verses that come before it, which talk about words used that will drag you before the council and words that will put you in danger of hell. The point here is that there are words that you use that offend people, but there are things you communicate to other people that put you in danger of hell. This is the difference between me telling someone as a joke to fuck off, which might offend people around me, and me telling a person that I think they are a wreck and failure at life, where what I'm communicating is much worse even though I'm using tamer language. In this sense, I think we have to see the altar thing as what pleases humans and what pleases God (and really, a lot of the sermon on the mount is about that). So, I think what's going on here is that placing gifts on the altar is an act of piety that is impressive to people, but what God cares about is redemption and reconciliation with other people. I don't think that this is a hard and fast rule for whether or not you need to confront someone before a worship service, since I don't think that's always wise or loving, but is really done out of guilt and a desire to be pious before people (which is what this is against).

"So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. What I tell you in the dark, utter in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim upon the housetops" (10:26-27).

The first part of this verse, I've usually taken to be referring to sin and God's judgment: everything bad you have done will eventually be revealed. I don't think it's actually this particular verse that I'm thinking of, but almost identical passages either elsewhere in Matthew or in another gospel. In any case, that isn't what it's about. This passage is surrounded on both sides by talk about the two kingdoms (thanks, Bob) and about God being on the side of the disciples who are being sent out. Immediately before that verse it talks about how the "servants" will be maligned even worse than the "master" has been. So, what Jesus is saying is that what is covered (that they really do follow God, not Beelzebul) will eventually be known to everyone. In other words, it's a statement about identity and which kingdom they belong to rather than anything to do with sin or judgment, or a reason to fear. People say that these servants serve evil, but in the end God will say that they were part of his kingdom. The following verses talk about how important it is to not be afraid, which fits in just right with it.

Also, I've been noticing how physical Matthew is, and struck but how critical this physical side was to Jesus' mission. When John asked if he was the messiah, Jesus says that the sick are being healed and that good news is being given to the poor. He doesn't mention anything about forgiving sins (even though he's been doing that,) or about changes in peoples behavior and morals. Which isn't to say that those things are not important to Jesus, only that their importance has been exaggerated in contemporary interpretations (and thanks to Augstine!) Similarly, when Jesus sends out his disciples they are to heal the sick, cast out demons, and talk about the kingdom. The physical world is critical to Jesus' mission and the mission of his followers, and cannot simply be discarded as something that will pass away.

innocence

I've been thinking about innocence lately, and about people talk about it as a virtue, but what they mean by innocence is mostly ignorance. I don't think that ignorance is a virtue, and I have been thinking about what it means to be innocent, or why it is that I think some people are more innocent now than at other times that I've known them. People talk about children as being innocent, but I don't think that children really are innocent. I don't mean this in the original sin, depravity, born into sin sort of way, that children are born sinful and are therefore not innocent. Not to mention I've learned over the past year about how this image of innocent children has really only developed in the last two hundred years, and seeing its origins makes me much more skeptical and disgusted when people talk about childhood as the seat of innocence and virtue and imagination and nostalgia. I don't want to be a child, and I don't think that I was more innocent as a child. I want to imagine innocence being something that can continue even once people know, and that in fact requires them to be able to see reality clearly, rather than shying away from it. I don't know why I'm interested in redefining this word, but I am. I suppose I'm thinking of innocence as the capacity to see reality and still believe, to have hope, to have hope as an epistemology (thanks, Lindsey,) rather than a state of perfection or sinlessness or ignorance. I don't think that children know enough to really be innocent.

Who knows, maybe being an innocent is really just being dumb.

And...unrelated: rereading the story of "the fall" recently, it struck me that this story never mentions sin, and that the author of Genesis is interested in this story as an explanation of how death entered the world rather than how sin or evil entered the world (though sin is mentioned soon afterwards in the story of C + A). It's about the problem of death rather than the problem of evil. This is interesting to me, especially because I'm not really against death, or afraid of death, and because I don't think there has been a time in the universe when things lived and never died.

prayer

I haven't prayed, really, for about a year. Last fall quarter I prayed quite a bit, and it was such a traumatic experience that I really haven't taken it up again. By prayer, I mean setting aside a chunk of time to speak to God and to listen to him, which I think is actually a quite limited understanding of prayer. But I haven't prayed like that for some time, and I think that soon I might be able to again.

But what am I praying? Prayer lately has been thinking about those around me who are suffering. Most of the time I don't know what to pray. Everything seems arrogant or insufficient. I feel arrogant when I pray towards a certain solution or end, and I feel arrogant assuming that I know what would be a good or appropriate result for a situation in a person's life. So mostly what I pray is for God to have mercy on them, and on me*. This is really the only way I have been able to pray for months, praying for both the living and the dead.

This isn't mercy as in "they really effed up, now please don't destroy them," because that's rarely what I'm praying.

book obsession

Here is a list of all the books that I read this year. I read books by authors from 22 different countries: Russia, France, England, Germany, South Africa, Japan, India, USA, Austria, Persia, Canada, Portugal, Brazil, Columbia, Turkey, Iraq, Peru, Iran, Algeria, Zimbabwe, Hungary, and Chile. Last year I decided that I wanted to read more Latin American writers, and I definitely did so. My reading list has a strong gender bias: only 1/5th of these were written by women. Only about 2/7 were written before the 20th century.


The List
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Candide - Voltaire
Meditations on First Philosophy - Rene Descartes
Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
The Master of Petersburg - J.M. Coetzee
On Liberty - John Stuart Mill
Musui's Story - Katsu Kokichi
Fury - Salman Rushdie
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami
Adventures in Missing the Point - Campolo/McLaren
Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis - Sigmund Freud
A Very Short Introduction to Globalization - Manfred Steger
Runaway World - Anthony Giddens
The End of Poverty - Jeffrey Sachs
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
The Rubaiyat - Omar Khayyam
First Snow on Fuji - Yasunari Kawabata
Beloved - Toni Morrison
The Black Company - Glen Cook
The Vagina Monologues - Eve Ensler
Ceremony - Leslie Silko
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven - Sherman Alexie
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
No Longer Human - Osamu Dazai
Blindness - Jose Saramago
The Two Deaths of Quincas Wateryell -Jorge Amado
Diary of a Mad Old Man - Junichiro Tanizaki
Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
City of Djinns - William Dalrymple
The Woman in the Dunes - Kobo Abe
The First Horseman - John Aberth
After the Quake - Haruki Murakami
The Black Book - Orhan Pamuk
Thousand Cranes - Yasunari Kawabata
Slow Man - J.M. Coetzee
Epic of Gilgamesh
Arabian Nights
The War of the Saints - Jorge Amado
Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words - Jay Rubin
Snow Country - Yasunari Kawabata
The Ark Sakura - Kobo Abe
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Baltasar and Blimunda - Jose Saramago
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
If This Be Treason - Gregory Rabassa
Confessions of an Economic Hitman - John Perkins
Baghdad Burning - Riverbend
The Makioka Sisters - Junichiro Tanizaki
In Praise of the Stepmother - Mario Vargas Llosa
Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee
Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi
Fantasia - Assia Djebar
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
The Book of Not - Tsitsi Dangarembga
Adam Bede - George Eliot
The Icarus Girl - Helen Oyeyemi
The Sign of Four - Arthur Conan Doyle
Personal Knowledge - Michael Polanyi
A Study in Scarlet - Arthur Conan Doyle
No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy
After Dark - Haruki Murakami
The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolano
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
The History of the Siege of Lisbon - Jose Saramago


Top Ten Novels (no order)
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky.
The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolano.
The Black Book - Orhan Pamuk
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
Blindness - Jose Saramago
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

This is a pretty unsurprising list, considering what I read. They weren't necessarily the ten best reading experiences, some of them are really frustrating/exhausting books to read (Savage Detectives, One Hundred Years, Black Book). But, this is probably close to the list that I would make in 5 years looking back. I wish that everyone in the world would read Brothers Karamazov. Another reflection: I read fatty books, fatty novels, but they're often the best books I read.

All in all, I think it was a good year for reading. I don't think there's anything on the list that I regret reading. Some of what I read just wasn't very good, but I still think it was worth reading for one purpose or another. Reading ambitions for the coming year: I want to read more non-fiction. Part of this is more reading on diseases and epidemics (the historical and societal side, not the biological side). I'd also like to read more academic theological writing, since most books on Christianity that I've read have been popular inspirational writings, or writing on spirituality and "Christian living." That's fine, but I want something more meaty. And, I want to read some good travel writing. I say that I want to read more philosophy, but I'm not sure how helpful it is to just dive in and read philosophical works, or how realistic it is. Specifically, I want to read more works on epistemology. And, finally, I want to read more linguistic theory.

On the fiction side, I want to keep up with reading Japanese and Latin American authors, as well as more 19th century literature and more American authors. Books that I'm either excited to read, planning to read, or wanting to read in the next year:

- 2666 - Roberto Bolano. I just finished reading The Savage Detectives, and wanted to keep reading his writing. Apparently 2666 is his masterpiece.
- Soul Mountain - Gao Xingjian. I know some of my friends had trouble reading this, but I'd still like to give it a shot.
- Don DeLillo. I'll probably end up reading White Noise, and maybe Cosmopolis.
- All the Names - Jose Saramago. Like Rushdie, or Marquez, Saramago can be a really irritating writer. But, I keep going back to read more, so he's doing something right or I'm just dumb.
- The Unconsoled / When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro.
- Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands - Jorge Amado. Another irritating writer that I like to read.
-Dickens. I'm not sure which of his novels yet, but Oliver Twist is on my shelf, so that's a likely candidate, although this is another book that friends of mine have hated.
-N.T. Wright. I haven't read anything by him, and don't know what to read of his, but I want to read something.
- I am a Cat - Natsume Soseki. Worth it for the title alone.
- The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie.

We'll see what happens.

tsunami

Today is the 4th anniversary of the south-east asian tsunami. This is something I realized early after waking up this morning, and I remember thinking about it last year as well (and probably the year before that, as well). What's strange for me isn't necessarily that most people have "forgotten" or that they just don't remember. The strange part is that the tsunami, for me, is the most important historical event of my lifetime, more important to me than 9/11, or hurricane katrina, the war in iraq, the election of a black president, darfur, etc. I'm not making claims about its historical importance in relation to these other events, just its importance to me. But the tsunami is much more haunting to me and has much more impact than these other events. I don't even understand why I feel this way, or I why I feel so strongly about it, but I do. One year from now, I want to be in Phuket attending the tsunami memorials, but we'll see if that happens. In large part, I would just like to talk to the people who were there when it came.

undeworld

I like to know what people do. What their work is, how their work works, what they do there, how things run. I'm excited for more of my friends to graduate and get jobs so that I can talk to them about what they do and how it works, what it requires of them, and what they think of all of that. Which is partially why I feel drawn to the underworld, I'm curious about what goes on and how things work.

christmas

Well, I haven't bought or made a single Christmas present for anyone so far this year. Several years back I would say that I wasn't getting presents for people because I would rather get them something at a random point in the year that I knew they cared about rather than buying them junk that they'll never use. But I never actually did that.

This is my first SPU Christmas break that I didn't go back to Thailand. Also the first that I had no wisdom teeth pulled, no visits to a clinic or hospital. No motorbike. This will be the first Christmas in 11 years that I have been in the States. I miss Thailand a lot, especially seeing the Christmas pictures popping up on my friends' sites. I do not miss being one of the wise men in my church's sunday school production of the Christmas story.

I am eager to avoid Christmas events this year, especially church Christmas events. I just don't care about fighting for "the real meaning of Christmas." What I want is to hear the story of Jesus' birth and the events surrounding his birth without any reference to "the real meaning," or even the meaning, of Christmas. Incidentally, griping about consumerism is also old hat and isn't very productive. In that way, I am bored of Christmas.