Elias.

A son of prayers, if there ever was one. He's still wheezy more than a baby should be (the surgeon told us that infants with TEF have softer tracheas), and his herniated belly-button might be causing us more concern than it warrants (doctors don't do anything about them until kids are four years old or so) - but overall he's been gaining weight quickly and acting more and more like his brothers and sister did at his age. I can finally write about him now, since the raw agony of panic has for the most part subsided, along with the bulk of all those feelings of foreboding I had before.

Still, the valleys of the shadow formed such a regular sort of rhythm for the last several months we can't help but feel a bit of flinching expectancy. Father, please forgive our fears, and at the same time don't lead us into temptation-deliver us from evil.

Also been feeling a general cloud of malaise - probably from lack of sleep and company - these last few weeks. Brandy has had even less sleep than I have, and the older kids have suffered quite a bit of neglect in the mornings. It's a little disappointing how much our family boat can rock after a few big waves. But still, the comforting rhythms of Thanking our Father in Heaven for our breakfast, reading to the kids before bed, or going through the first ten or so questions of the Westminster Shorter Catechism have done a lot to help us find our sea-legs again. The one thing I do miss is closer fellowship with other strong believers (or even not so strong believers).

I guess we could seek it out, but it's difficult to find time or presence of mind to arrange anything that would work, and so many friendly visits with believers we don't know so well can end up being mostly small talk.

Small talk...is it the human equivalent of canine rear-sniffing? I guess it's necessary in its way, as a sort of preliminary to real conversations that might follow; but it can be very tiring.

Going through Genesis for our weekly bible-study. Brandy can't participate as much since she's doing the bulk of baby-holding, and since bible-study hours coincide with Elias' fussy hours. Ben and Rose have been our faithful attendees for the past six months or more, others have come and gone, TJ's been so busy with his extra work at the Roaster in Camano Island he hasn't shown for a while. In a lot of ways a good bible study is a lot harder to put together than a "teaching". The organizer has to come up with questions that aren't too hard for people to understand, but aren't too easy either. Just like in a class, people are hesitant to answer the first because they think they'll get it wrong and embarrass themselves, or reluctant to answer the second kind because it's boring or degrading. Thinking of good questions is like fine-tuning a dial.

But life is Good, God has blessed us, I am full of blessings and peanut butter. The only think I want right now is Light, more Light - conscious fellowship with God in Christ.

Poetic Diction

Owen Barfield, friend of C.S. Lewis & Anthroposophist, proposes that poetic diction is about gain of consciousness. He believes early languages carried more meaning-per-word than current ones, since people hadn't yet made as many distinctions. (I'll give an example: the words for "hat, hood, and hut all come from the same old word meaning a shelter/covering, and later they were separated to mean more specific things.) and that as language progresses with human development, words become more specialized. In the process, they also lose meaning, and the men who use them lose the awareness of connections that have been lost in the splitting of words. the poet's task is to produce this felt change by uniting words that have a connected meaning to reawaken the consciousness of these unities. Barfield claims that "Language is fossil poetry" (meaning, all the words we use now are poetic and/or metaphors, e.g. "purchase" now means to buy, but comes from old english "to pursue, seek")
Therefore, poetry is a constant process of reminding mankind of meanings that have been lost.

The process never ends, but humanity has reached a point where the rational mind is much more dominant now. Words have lost their intrinsic native poetry, but sice we're more conscious, with poetry we can reclaim our lost perceptions of reality in a more conscious way now.

He also says that poetic diction isn't the same thing as "verse" (rhyming, meter, stanzas) but can be used in what we call "prose" as well. It's any use of language that produces that "felt change of consciousness".

I liked it, It's taken me quite a while to get through the whole thing, and it's the kind of book you know you'll have to read a couple more times to really "get" it.

He's not a reductionist, and believes that words really mean something, and that there are realities out there that we're trying to capture and communicate when we speak. Meaning, his "gain of consciousness" is a real gain, we're understanding more about the real world. He also went into "meaning" at the end where he challenged the "subject object" (subject=the conscious observer, object=the thing observed) way of looking at things, saying that it's not "subjective" to make a connection between a concept and a perceived object-as most modern people would say-since it's thought, not the subject, that makes the connection. In fact, we only recognize ourselves as 'subjects' by the 'grace of thought'.

Basically, that we percieve ourselves as distinct people because of "thought". He almost makes it sound like we "participate" in thought, rather than producing it autonomously. I wondered about the implications of that take on things...at first it sounded heretical, but then I thought about how in John 1 it says that "The true life that gives light to all men was coming into the world". If Jesus gives and gave light to "all men" and light is usually used in scripture to mean "perception", then that would basically mean what Barfield says it means, that Jesus is the one upholding our thought process moment by moment - "In Him we live and move and have our being". I vaguely remembered Job says something about thought and wisdom, and found the spot where Elihu says "It is the spirit in man, the breath of the Almighty, tha makes him understand".

Hmmmm....

I guess, if I believe that Jesus holds all material things together moment by moment (In him all things hold together-Colossians) It's not too much of a stretch to say that He does the same thing with thought.

Anyhow, Barfield's main deal is that poetry is a means of acquiring real consciousness & meaning.

Of course, we'd have to go back to Galatea 2.2 and say that sure, this may be so, but all the poetry and gain in consciousness in the world isn't going to keep us from dying or "doing ourselves in with tire irons". Like Solomon said in Ecclesiastes: "Then I saw that there was more gain in wisdom than in folly, as there is more gain in light than darkness. The wise has eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness. And yet, I perceived that the same event [death] happens to all of them."

The fool "walks in darkness", Solomon says. Now, we know that, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.

Like Jesus said, "I am the light of the world. whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light...of life." the light that comes from Jesus, as we follow him, is the remedy that Solomon sought. The light of human wisdom frustrated Solomon because it left the wise man dead in the end, just as dead as any fool. But the Light of God, in Jesus, is the light (understanding/wisdom) of life. Not the kind that leaves you cold in the end, but the kind that initiates you into the life without end.

I woke up at 11am this morning. I was going to go to the DMV -but it closes at 12noon on Saturdays. It's just as well, since I still don't have the proper documentation.

I got offered the 40hr/wk position at work-and took it.
I also got my personal size reference ESV bible in the mail, I'm pretty excited about it. It's just the right size, and it's signature bound. (That means it's stitched in little folded bundles called "signatures" to the spine, rather than glued to the backing. Stitched bindings last longer)

Met a kid on the bus the other day, his name was Aaron. He was a black kid (I say "Kid", but he was in his early twenties) from Michigan-apparently a pretty tough neighborhood in Grand Rapids. He's a Christian, has been from when he was a boy, and started the conversation by saying he liked my shirt & saw me reading my bible & thought that was cool. He reminded me of Averill from St Paul. We got to talking, and he asked for my cell #. I pray for him that things go well, he said he's having some hard times here in WA. I was very glad for his company on the bus, since I haven't really run across any believers to talk to on the bus here so far. It also made me want to give Averill a call. It's so strange to think that there are these people who have affected and been affected by you, who've had heart to heart conversations and shared the good and bad with you, who've had real communion with the Lord Jesus Christ with you, that just drift away from you until they're hard to remember.

I can say I really miss a lot of the people from Minnesota ("a lot" being about 20). I've spent a longer time there than any other place I've ever lived, and that's where I walked through the door into Life, where I met my first Christian friends, my mentors and heroes, my first close friendships in Jesus, my great adventures, the place where I was able to give help to those who needed it, and really get to know people. And now there's so much space between us, space and time. I wish I had a better memory, I wish I put the one I have to better use.

It's good to have a wife, someone who shares my experiences like no one else. So much of understanding and communication has to do with shared experience. Commonality in our vocabulary, our stories, our values, our joys and terrors are largely dependent on common experience. And shared experience isn't something you can go to school to learn, or pay to get, it only comes with commitment, and a shared life.
Granted, we don't share all our experiences, I don't really know very well what it's like to stay home all day and take care of the kids, go to the grocery store, cook and clean, and Brandy doesn't know what it's like at my work or on the bus, but I guess that's probably why we spend the time listening to the stories of each other's days-to do our best to gain what common experience we can through imagination.

Watched "Gandhi" last night with Brandy. After a little research I found he was influenced by G.K. Chesterton and Sundar Singh, it also became clear that what set him apart most from other men were not the Koran's or Vedic teachings, but rather the teachings of Jesus that he attempted to follow. His non-violence was based in the gospels, which he freely admitted. But I still don't know what to think of even that interpretation of Jesus' words. I haven't known for 27 years for sure how Jesus meant for us to carry that out, and I haven't really ever changed my position on violence-using it only to protect the weak. I pray and hope I'm not wrong, but unless I have a revelation I don't think there's enough in scripture to call for strict nonresistance. It would cost too much for such an uncertain interpretation that seems in other parts of scripture to be contradicted.

Sometimes I feel like I have a very, very weak grasp on reality and sanity. I felt that way for part of this afternoon. The only times I don't feel that way is when I'm acting on stimulus-response mode, or when I'm in open communication with Jesus. I was having a hard time until I flipped to John 8:12 where Jesus says, "I am the light of the world, whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life." Jesus says that if we follow him, all that darkness and confusion will disappear as His light shows us what everything really is, and is like. And not only will we see all of that by the light, but we'll Have that light. I forget sometimes what it was like before. When I didn't know what the meaning of life was, or what I wanted to do, what I should do. I'm grateful for the difference. Right after reading and trying to memorize that verse, I started reading a Biography of Eberhard Arnold that quoted Jesus' words in John 8:12. I took that as a confirmation.