That’s the question Neil Gaiman answers in his poem “Instructions,” which I love; since I found out today that YouTube has a video of him reading it, I had to post it.
Interestingly, the artist Charles Vess is working to turn it into a picture book. Follow the link for a sample illustration, and links to more. That ought to be wonderful.
I was there when they crucified my Lord;
I held the scabbard when the soldier drew his sword.
I threw the dice when they pierced his side,
But I’ve seen love conquer the great divide.
—U2/B. B. King, “When Love Comes to Town”
OK, so I was on a bit of a U2 kick this trip. Even so, this is a great lyric, and something every Christian ought to be able to sing full-throated, with a full heart.
I believe in the Kingdom Come,
Then all the colours will bleed into one,
Bleed into one;
But yes, I’m still running.
You broke the bonds,
You loosed the chains,
You carried the cross and
All my shame,
All my shame;
You know I believe it.But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.
But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.
—U2, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”
I don’t want to get into the argument about what U2 themselves mean by this song. According to the Wikipedia article, “both Bono and Edge have . . . called it a gospel song on numerous occasions,” and I have no reason to doubt that; I’ve seen other sites assert that they have repeatedly called it a song of “spiritual yearning,” which seems obvious enough, though I’ve never seen any original source for either of these attributions. At the same time, reading around the ‘Net, it’s clear that a lot of U2 fans don’t want to believe that the song’s about anything of the sort, and they’re entitled to their own opinions.
My interest at the moment, though, is rather different; if you wanted to be technical, I suppose you could say that I’m setting aside questions of authorial intent and opting for a bit of reader-response criticism. To wit, it occurred to me as I was listening to this song on the way home Monday that whatever U2 means by this song, it serves quite well as an apt expression of our experience of the process of sanctification (or of mine, at least). I believe all those things, too—and yet I would have to confess that in some ways, at least, I too am still running. There are still areas where I resist what God desires to do in my life, and areas in which I follow him determinedly until the temptation gets too tempting, at which point I run off like any other dumb sheep convinced that the grass over there really must be tastier. (Only to find out when I get there, as always, that the “grass” is really only extra-long Astroturf.)
I believe it all, but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for—not in God, but in me, and in my own life. I haven’t found the trust, the submission, the willingness to follow faithfully; I’ve found the peace of God, but not the contentment to rest in it, and the joy of God, but not the single-mindedness to stay in it, instead of jumping off to go check out other things to see if they might be better. I’ve found the beauty of the gospel and the glorious blessing of the grace of God, but not the ability to wholeheartedly trust that they are for me. I preach it, I preach it constantly, but I do so as much as anything because I know I need to hear it, because I haven’t found it in me to fully believe it. Not yet.
But by the grace of God, I know I will—not by my efforts, but by his gift. His grace doesn’t depend on me, one way or the other; and whether I can always fully believe it or not, I know he who promised is faithful, and will do it. And for that I give thanks.
New adventures with Slip’n’Slides . . .
As Bill says, I don’t know if this is real or faked, but if it’s real, it’s amazing.
Ordinarily, I just ignore things like this; but for some reason, this idiot really irks me. (HT: Allahpundit)
This guy doesn’t even fall into the “knows just enough Hebrew to be dangerous” category, because he doesn’t actually know any Hebrew at all—or, indeed, much of anything about Hebrew. For all his pompous statement “I will report the facts. You can decide,” he’s precious short on facts and long on false assertions. Watch the video if you want to, and then let’s go through it, if you’re interested. (If you aren’t, don’t bother to click “Read More,” just scroll down to the next post.)
One: “Aramaic is the most ancient form of Hebrew.” That’s about like calling French the most ancient form of Portuguese. Aramaic isn’t a form of Hebrew, it’s a different language—closely related, another Northwest Semitic language, but a different language.
Two: he relies on back-translations, which are necessarily conjectural, but presents them as if they were proven fact. Sloppy. Very sloppy.
Three: barack is the Arabic cognate of Hebrew barak, which is also used as a name (so see Judges 4-5; “Barak” is the name of Deborah’s general). Barak means “he blesses” or “he kneels”; the word baruch, which we also know as a name, means “blessed” and is the noun form of this verb. Baraq may sound the same, but it’s a completely different word, with a completely different root (beth-resh-qoph instead of beth-resh-kaph); the similarity in sound is meaningless, nothing but a red herring.
Four: the person who made this video is clearly unaware that the Hebrew alphabet does not have any vowels. During the post-biblical period a group of scholars called the Masoretes added pointing (a system of dots) to indicate vowels, to preserve the reading of the text of the Hebrew Scriptures, but these are not original to the text. A couple consonants, yodh and vav, were used in the original Hebrew to indicate certain vowels (hē was also used this way at the end of words, much as we end words with “-ah” and “-oh”); the Masoretes included notations in their pointing system to indicate when these consonants were being, essentially, used as vowels.
Five: even if bamah (or rather its Aramaic equivalent) was in fact the word Jesus used in Luke 10:18, as this video suggests, it would have been plural, not singular, and quite different in form (bamatey, I think; I don’t have my language tools with me at the moment, and Hebrew was never my strong suit).
Six: the individual who did this video declares, “the Hebrew letter waw [or vav] is often transliterated as a ‘U.’ Some scholars use the ‘O’ for this transliteration. It is primarily used as a conjunction to join concepts together.”
This is wrong.
As I noted above, one of the ways in which Hebrew used the vav (and also the yodh and the he) was to indicate certain vowels; when the Masoretes came along to add vowel pointing to help people know how to pronounce the text, they came up with special points to indicate when, say, vav was being used as a “u” (sureq) or an “o” (holem-vav), as opposed to when it was simply a consonantal “v.” (The technical term for those is matres lectiones, or “mothers of reading.”) It is incorrect to say that vav “is often transliterated as a ‘u’,” and still more incorrect to say that ‘o’ is a different transliteration used by “some scholars.” Rather, sometimes when the consonant vav is in the text, it’s serving as a “u,” and sometimes it’s serving as an “o.”However, this is different from the use of vav in the Hebrew conjunction, which is the prefix ve-.
Now, that said, one of the oddities of Hebrew is that before beth, mem, and pe, the conjunction changes from ve to a sureq, becoming a “u” sound, which is no doubt what the person behind this video is trying, however ineptly, to say. Again, though, “heights” is plural, and so even if his assumption that bamah underlies the Greek text is correct, it would not be in the singular form bamah, but in a plural form.
Thus, it is simply wrong to assert that Jesus, in talking about Satan falling from heaven like lightning, would have said ubama; it’s wrong even if you assume that Jesus would have used bamah to denote heaven, which is unproven. Thus, the last name of our president isn’t in the text of Luke 10:18 in any way. As for our president’s first name, while Jesus might have said baraq, that’s not the same as barak. Plus, the person behind this video has forgotten that Jesus didn’t say, “I saw Satan fall lightning heaven,” but “like lightning from heaven”—there’s a preposition before, and another one in the middle, and rest assured the one in the middle isn’t “Hussein.” It would be, rather, the Aramaic equivalent to the Hebrew min-. The one before would be the equivalent to the Hebrew prefix ki-.
As such, the closest to “Barack Obama” that Jesus could have spoken would have been something like kibaraq min-ubamatey . . . and that just isn’t good enough to support this farrago of nonsense that Jesus told us that Barack Obama is the Antichrist.
Update: I’ve added a few key points to this argument here. I hate it when people misuse Scripture to their own ends; this is a particularly egregious example.
One of the key facts about the push to nationalize our healthcare system is that it’s coming from people who have absolutely no intention to live under the system they’re trying to produce. Barack Obama even admitted as much last month, though the media has done its best to ignore the fact. Give Jake Tapper and Karen Travers credit, though, for refusing to sweep the president’s admission under the rug:
President Obama struggled to explain today whether his health care reform proposals would force normal Americans to make sacrifices that wealthier, more powerful people—like the president himself—wouldn’t face. . . .
Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist and researcher at the New York University Langone Medical Center, said that elites often propose health care solutions that limit options for the general public, secure in the knowledge that if they or their loves ones get sick, they will be able to afford the best care available, even if it’s not provided by insurance.
Devinsky asked the president pointedly if he would be willing to promise that he wouldn’t seek such extraordinary help for his wife or daughters if they became sick and the public plan he’s proposing limited the tests or treatment they can get.
The president refused to make such a pledge, though he allowed that if “it’s my family member, if it’s my wife, if it’s my children, if it’s my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care.”
That’s telling. Would the president be willing to accept limitations on the care his wife and children could receive for the sake of the greater good? Dr. Devinsky asked. No, the president would not. He evaded the question for as long as he could with a non sequitur about his dying grandmother, but when he finally came back around to answering it briefly, that was his answer: no.
And after all, he won’t have to accept the limitations of his plan—he’s the President of the United States. He’s famous, he’s powerful, he defines well-connected . . . and he’s a member of a government which routinely exempts its own members from the limitations of the laws it passes. Obamacare for thee, but not for me and mine, is indeed his attitude—he’s too important and valuable a person for that. That’s only for us ordinary barbarians.
For my part, I agree with Ed Morrissey:
If ObamaCare isn’t good enough for Sasha, Malia, or Michelle, then it’s not good enough for America. Instead of fighting that impulse, Obama should be working to boost the private sector to encourage more care providers, less red tape and expense, and better care for everyone.
But that’s not what he’s doing, and it’s not what he’s going to do; that’s how he wants it to work for him and his family, but not for everyone else. Unless, of course, they’re political allies whose support he needs and to whom he owes favors—then they can get special treatment too:
Who will decide when medical care is just too expensive to bother with? Who will be left to perish because they just aren’t worth the lifesaving effort? Well, for sure it won’t be any members of Congress or anyone that works for the federal government because they won’t be expected to suffer under the nationally socialized plan. It also won’t be Obama’s buddies in the unions who are about to be similarly exempted from the national plan, at least if Senator Max Baucus has his way.
Insisting on standards for others to which one is unwilling to hold oneself? The word for that, I believe, is “hypocrisy”—and the forces of Obamacare are rife and rank with it. As James Lewis pointed out recently on the American Thinker website, one of our leading advocates of socialized medicine makes a pretty good poster boy for it.
Senator Ted Kennedy, who is now 76 years old and was diagnosed with brain cancer in May of last year, is telling the world that nationalized medical care is “the cause of his life.” He wants to see it pass as soon as possible, before he departs this vale of tears.
The prospect of Kennedy’s passing is viewed by the liberal press with anticipatory tears and mourning. But they are not asking the proper question by their own lights: That question—which will be asked for you and me when we reach his age and state in life—is this:
Is Senator Kennedy’s life valuable enough to dedicate millions of dollars to extending it another month, another day, another year?
Because Barack Obama and Ted Kennedy agree with each other that they of all people are entitled to make that decision. Your decision to live or die will now be in their hands.
Ted Kennedy is now 76. Average life expectancy in the United States is 78.06. For a man who has already reached 76, life expectancy is somewhat longer than average (since people who die younger lower the national average); for a wealthy white man it may be somewhat longer statistically; but for a man with diagnosed brain cancer it is correspondingly less. As far as the actuarial tables of the Nanny State are concerned, Kennedy is due to leave this life some time soon. The socialist State is not sentimental, at least when it comes to the lives of ordinary people like you and me.
The socialist question—and yes, it is being asked very openly in socialist countries all around the world, like Britain and Sweden—must be whether extending Senator Kennedy’s life by another day, another month or year issocially valuable enough to pay for what is no doubt a gigantic and growing medical bill. Kennedy is a US Senator, and all that money has been coughed up without complaint by the US taxpayer. Kennedy is already entitled to Federal health care, and it is no doubt the best available to anyone in the world. . . .
There might be a rational debate over the social utility of Senator Kennedy’s life. We could all have a great national debate about it. Maybe we should do exactly that, to face the consequences of what the Left sees as so humane, so obviously benevolent, and so enlightened.
Consider what happens in the Netherlands to elderly people. The Netherlands legalized “assisted suicide” in 2002, no doubt in part for compassionate reasons. But also to save money. . . .
There’s only so much money available. The Netherlands radio service had a quiz show at one time, designed to “raise public awareness” about precisely that question. Who deserves to live, and who to die?
But nobody debates any more about who has the power to make that decision. In socialist Europe the State does. It’s a done deal. . . .
In the socialist Netherlands Kennedy would be a perfect candidate for passive euthanasia.
Has anyone raised this question with Senator Kennedy? I know it seems to be in bad taste to even mention it. But if ObamaCare passes in the coming weeks, you can be sure that that question will be raised for you and me, and our loved ones. And no, we will not have a choice.
One set of standards for the rich and the powerful, and another for the rest of us. One set of medical options for those who write the laws (and those who influence them), and another for those of us who live under them. That’s liberalism? It seems to me there’s something seriously wrong with that.
Which is why, to my way of thinking, Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) is a hero of the fight over Obamacare. Rep. Fleming, a physician, is the author and sponsor of House Resolution 615, which he describes this way:
I’ve offered a bill, HR 615, to give them a chance to put their “health” where their mouth is: My resolution urges members of Congress who vote for this legislation to lead by example and enroll themselves in the public plan that their bill would create.
The current draft of the Democratic bill curiously exempts members of Congress from the government-run health care option: The people’s representatives would get to keep their existing health plans and services on Capitol Hill—even though the people wouldn’t.
If members of Congress believe so strongly that government-run health care is the best solution for hardworking American families, I think it only fitting that Americans see them lead the way. . . .
Congress has the bad habit of exempting itself from the problems it inflicts on the American people. From common workplace protections to transparency and accountability measures, lawmakers always seem to place themselves and their staffs just out of reach of the laws they create.
Americans don’t know that there is an attending physician on call exclusively for members of Congress, or that Congress enjoys VIP access and admission to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Bethesda Naval Medical Center.
It is past time that we make the men and women making the laws be exposed to the same consequences as the American public.
Public servants should always be accountable and responsible for what they are advocating, and I challenge the American people to demand this from their representatives.
We deserve health-care reform that puts a patient’s well being in the hands of a doctor, not a bureaucrat.
I think he’s right on. If it’s good enough for us, it’s good enough for the members of Congress, the employees of the Executive Branch (all the way up to the POTUS and his family), and the judges and staff of our courts. If you agree, you might want to go to Rep. Fleming’s official website and sign the online petition in support of HR 615. Well done, Rep. Fleming; trust a doctor to know a boil when he sees it, and know how to lance it—even a spiritual one.
Courtesy of The Onion, of course; though I have to admit, as someone whose inner child still remembers playing with G. I. Joe, Mask, and Transformers, to the sneaking thought that it would be cool if our army did have a dragon tank . . .
HT: Toby Brown
so said Robert Heinlein; forty years ago today, the human race took the first giant leap toward finding out if he was right.
Then five more landings, 10 more moonwalkers and, in the decades since, nothing. . . .
America’s manned space program is in shambles. Fourteen months from today, for the first time since 1962, the United States will be incapable not just of sending a man to the moon but of sending anyone into Earth orbit. We’ll be totally grounded. We’ll have to beg a ride from the Russians or perhaps even the Chinese.
Maybe I read too much science fiction, but I agree with Charles Krauthammer: that’s a crying shame. It marks, I think, a grand failure of vision, imagination, and nerve on the part of this country.
So what, you say? Don’t we have problems here on Earth? Oh, please. Poverty and disease and social ills will always be with us. If we’d waited for them to be rectified before venturing out, we’d still be living in caves.
Yes, we have a financial crisis. No one’s asking for a crash Manhattan Project. All we need is sufficient funding from the hundreds of billions being showered from Washington—”stimulus” monies that, unlike Eisenhower’s interstate highway system or Kennedy’s Apollo program, will leave behind not a trace on our country or our consciousness—to build Constellation and get us back to Earth orbit and the moon a half-century after the original landing.
I can’t imagine a better stimulus than to crank up the space program once again; not only would it stimulate the economy by creating lots of new high-paying jobs, it would also stimulate the national spirit. I wasn’t around for the first missions to the moon; I’d love to have a chance to see the new ones.
Someone who was, Joyce over at tallgrassworship, illustrates the very real significance of those missions, posting on her childhood memories of the Apollo 11 landing. I can understand the awe she reflects; even forty years later, watching the videos, it comes through.
Just for fun, here’s a map NASA produced overlaying the Apollo 11 expedition’s exploration of the lunar surface on a baseball diamond (HT: Graham MacAfee):
Yesterday and today have been busy and draining days; but today had a graceful coda: the MasterWorks concert. This is the last weekend for the MasterWorks Festival this year, so tonight and tomorrow night wrap the whole thing up, but this might have been the best one yet (of the ones I attended, anyway). The second half of the program was a brilliant performance of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4, which I’d actually never heard up to this point even though I love Tchaikovsky. It’s not quite the same, but I figured I’d post videos of the Chicago Symphony performing this at Carnegie Hall in 1997.
This is absolutely brilliant. (They did a good job with the meter and rhyme of the original, which is rare, and matching the sound, which is even rarer.)