Last night we began our Lenten Book Club. The first of six gatherings followed our first Lenten Supper - a time to gather and break our Tuesday to Wednesday Lenten fast with a simple meal, a short devotion, and a lot of good company. It was a great night.
Over Lent a group of approximately twenty people are banding together to read and discuss Croatian theologian and Yale Professor Miroslav Volf's newest book,
Free of Charge. This follows in the wake of Emergent's Theological Gathering that Yale hosted this last month.
A group of six people traveled from Jacob's Well to New Haven to learn from Volf and engage with others over the content of two of Volf's books:
Exclusion and Embrace and the already mentioned
Free of Charge. I had the distinct honor of getting to interact with Dr. Volf directly on the themes of this book, alongside the wonderful Anthony Smith, aka the
"Postmodern Negro" and Emergent's National Coordinator
Tony Jones (not pictured - photo courtesy of
James Mills). One of the personal highlights for me was traveling with my father who is a newly ordained Episcopal priest. It was fun to room with him and have his company as I enjoyed my friends from Jacob's Well and the larger community of Emergent. I love it when worlds collide and integrate. At this gathering, my relational cup overflowed - it was almost overwhelming. This truly is a "growing, generative friendship."
In both the titles we interacted with at this gathering, Volf engages on the relationship between the self and the other. They are both extraordinary books in their own ways.
Exclusion and Embrace was the more significant of the two for me, but
Free of Charge's simple themes of God's giving and forgiving nature caused both my friend Laura Lesniewski and I to remark that we may have internalized a fifth of what Volf was getting at in the book. In light of that, and in recognition that the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams named
Free of Charge the Anglican church's "official 2006 Lent book," we decided we would follow suit.
So now I am rereading this book only a month after my initial completion of it. Needless to say, my love challenged heart can take all the encouragement available. And last night was an encouragement. We had a great turn-out and a great discussion. At first I was worried - any time you have over twenty people gathered to discuss something, the size itself can be limiting. Fortunately, that did not seem to be the case. It was also nice to focus on one chapter; in the past we have read an entire book and then taken a single evening to process its content. This format of a chapter a week is a good one.
Also, I really love having specific spiritual practices particular to unique liturgical seasons. There is something really rich there.
My favorite part of chapter one, "God the Giver," is found in Volf's discussion of Luther's understanding of the love of God revealed in Christ. He quotes Luther: "The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it." Volf continues,
Consider, first, what Luther calls human love, but which is better described as distorted love. It's elicited by the object of love; it's basically passive in the sense that it depends on the object of love. Its only activity, says, Luther, consists in 'receiving something'...Contrast this kind of possessive love with divine love. First, divine love never had to come into being at all; it wasn't elicited by its object. It simply is. It doesn't depend on the truth, beauty, or goodness of the beloved. Second, as Luther stated, because God's love isn't caused by its object, it can love those who are not lovable, 'sinners, evil persons, fools, and weaklings in order to make them righteous, good, wise, and strong.' Luther concluded, 'rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows forth and bestows good.'
Also, the podcasts from the Yalee event can be downloaded
here. Finally, Jason Clark and some of the Emergent folks across the pond are hosting a
Free of Charge Lenten blog discussion. Check it out.
Today was the annual Brookside St. Patrick's Day Parade. This is always a sign that Spring is close: green everywhere! In fact, the weather obliged today and although the day began gray, the sun eventually burned off the cloud cover and we couldn't have asked for it to be more beautiful. Almost 80 degrees.
I always take a bunch of pictures at this thing: all our neighbors are around, our neighborhood parish school, St. Peter's, marches in the parade, and it is a bit of a freak show, to boot. All my favorite kinds of things.
Additionally, it reminds of the many reasons I love Apple products so much: the ease with which I can create media so quickly after an event like this. My wife has completely given up making photo albums. We take gads of digital pics and then load them into iPhoto. From there I either import them into iMovie and burn a slideshow through iDVD (i.e., our family's last two summer vacations), or I make a slideshow right in iPhoto, upload it onto my iDisk, then connect it to my .Mac homepage for viewing. The only disadvantage to this is that they are consistenly large files and as a result take awhile to download for viewing (even with high-speed connections). If you want a sample of what I'm talking about, click here. There are two other short movies on my .Mac homepage as well: the same parade in 2004 and a trip I took to Taize in the summer of 2003. Be warned though, they take a long time to download.
My other new favorite deal is using my phone to capture short video clips. Today I caught the bagpipe corps warming up as we walked to the parade. Check it out here.
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