Trees - The Most Effective Preachers

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Trees have always been the most effective preachers for me.  I revere them when they live in nations and families, in forests and groves.  And I revere them even more when they stand singly.  They are like solitaries.  Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, isolated men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche.  The world murmurs in their tops, their roots rest in the infinite; however, they do not lose themselves in it but, with all the energy of their lives, aspire to only one thing:  to fulfill their own innate law, to enlarge their own form, to represent themselves.

Nothing is more sacred, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree.  When a tree has been sawed off and shows its naked mortal wound to the sun, one can read its whole history on the bright disc of its stump and tombstone:  in its annual rings and cicatrizations are faithfully recorded all struggle, all suffering, all sickness, all fortune and prosperity, meager years and luxuriant years, attacks withstood, storms survived.  And every farm boy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that, high in the mountains and in ever-present danger, the most indestructible, most powerful, most exemplary tree trunks grow.


Trees are sanctuaries.  He who knows how to speak to them, to listen to them, learns the truth.  They do not preach doctrines and recipes, they preach the basic law of life, heedless of details.

A tree speaks:  In me is hidden a core, a spark, a thought, I am life of eternal life.  The experiment and throw [of the dice] that the eternal mother ventured on me is unique, unique is my shape and the system of veins in my skin, unique are the slightest play of foliage at my top and the smallest scar in my bark.  It is my office to shape and show the Eternal in the distinctively unique.  


A tree speaks:  My strength is trust.  I know nothing of my fathers, I know nothing of the thousand children which come out of me every year.  I live the mystery of my seed to the end, nothing else is my concern.  I trust that God is within me.  I trust that my task is sacred.  In this trust I live.

When we are sad and can no longer endure life well, a tree can speak to us:  Be calm!  Be calm! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is hard.  These are childish thoughts.  Let God talk within you and they will grow silent.  You are anxious because your road leads you away from your mother and your home.  But every step and day lead you anew to your mother.  Home is neither here nor there.  Home is inside you or nowhere.


A yearning to wander tears at my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind in the evening.  If one listens quietly and long, the wanderlust too shows its core and meaning.  It is not a wish to run away from suffering, as it seemed.  It is a yearning for home, for the memory of one's mother, for new symbols of life.  It leadshomeward.  Every road leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is the mother. 


Thus the tree rustles in the evening when we are afraid of our own childish thoughts.  Trees have long thoughts, long in breath and calm, as they have a longer life than we.  They are wiser than we, as long as we do not listen to them.  But when we have learned to listen to trees, the very brevity and swiftness and childish haste of our thoughts acquire an incomparable joy.  He who has learned to listen to trees no longer desires to be a tree.  He does not desire to be anything but that which he is.  That is home.  That is happiness.

by Hermann Hesse from Wanderings:  Notes and Sketches

Translation from First German Reader:  A Beginner's Dual-Language Book, edited by Harry Steinhauer, page 12-17.  Bantam Language Edition published 1964, 6th printing.  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:  64-7673.

Miserere Mei Deus - Kings College Chapel Choir

You gotta here this.  Relax .......

Depth - from Tor Norretranders

This is lifted from Edge:  The World Question Center

The question is WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY'S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?

 There are many responses and this one jumped out at me as it correlates with an interest of this blog.  I snipped out some interesting paragraphs in order to prevent this post from being too long.
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TOR NØRRETRANDERS
Science Writer; Consultant; Lecturer, Copenhagen; Author, The Generous Man and The User Illusion
 

Depth 

Depth is what you do not see immediately at the surface of things. Depth is what is below that surface: a body of water below the surface of a lake, the rich life of a soil below the dirt or the spectacular line of reasoning behind a simple statement.
 

Depth is a straightforward aspect of the physical world. Gravity stacks stuff and not everything can be at the top. Below there is more and you can dig for it.

Depth acquired a particular meaning with the rise of complexity science a quarter of a century ago: What is characteristic of something complex? Very orderly things like crystals are not complex. They are simple. Very messy things like a pile of litter are very difficult to describe: They hold a lot of information. Information is a measure of how difficult something is to describe. Disorder has a high information content and order has a low one. All the interesting stuff in life is in-between: Living creatures, thoughts and conversations. Not a lot of information, but neither a little. So information content does not lead us to what is interesting or complex. The marker is rather the information that is not there, but was somehow involved in creating the object of interest. The history of the object is more relevant than the object itself, if we want to pin-point what is interesting to us. 
 

It is not the informational surface of the thing, but its informational depth that attracts our curiosity. It took a lot to bring it here, before our eyes. It is not what is there, but what used to be there, that matters. Depth is about that.

.... 

Most conversational statements have some kind of depth: There is more than meets the ear, something that happened between the ears of the person talking — before a statement was made. When you understand the statement, the meaning of what is being said, you "dig it", you get the depth, what is below and behind. What is not said, but meant — the exformation content, information processed and thrown away before the actual production of explicit information.

......

 

That is also the point with abstractions: We want them to be shorthand for a lot of information that was digested in the process leading to the use of the abstraction, but is not present when we use it. Such abstractions have depth. We love them. Other abstraction have no depth. They are shallow and just used to impress the other guy. They do not help us. We hate them.  Intellectual life is very much about the ability to distinguish between the shallow and the deep abstractions. You need to know if there is any depth before you make that headlong dive and jump into it.

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a new definition of religion

From Drew Tatusko of the  Notes from Off Center blog:

Religion is an externalized desire for socio-historical coherence and order by appealing to a transcendent source of coherence and order; a transcendent source of coherence and order that is itself an image of that externalized desire.

see the whole article here:

a new definition of religion

I don't like Westerns except for ones like True Grit

Saw True Grit on New Year's Eve.  Read a number of reviews including one by Stanley Fish at the New York Times.  Never saw the John Wayne version of 1969 nor read Charles Portis' book.  That said, I liked the attempt at realism.  The language captivated me.  It was formal and with surprising word choices and vocabulary not typical of Westerns.  Yet the characters seemed to disclose themselves and their feelings more deeply.  Perhaps normal, everyday people back then were like that.  I've read a few letters from that time from ordinary people which seem to bear that out.  (Think I may take up some reading from authors of that period, the late 19th century.)  The most interesting character was Mattie, the fourteen year old whose determination to seek justice for her Father's killer created the story.  While many justifiably are fascinated by the role of Grace in the movie, what I keep pondering is the role of belief, certainty, and order.  What provided Mattie with the self-confidence to pursue her goal?  She is single minded and optimistic that she can accomplish it.  Why did she so doggedly desire to do so?  Realistically, her talents should have been directed to taking care of her family rather than endangering herself in such a manner.  Why did she have such Faith?  It seems clear to me that she had a view of the way life is supposed to be.  There is an order to existence that calls not only for proper spelling, something very important to her and I'm led to believe a key to her character,  but capture and punishment for the criminal who killed her Father.  Despite all the danger she has something in her to keep her on the path to this result she deems necessary.  A reasonable and rational person in the normal sense of those terms would have weighed the costs and demurred. 

Evolutionary Christianity Gives Me Hope

Somehow learned of this site recently titled Evolutionary Christianity.  Michael Dowd is interviewing a number of scientists and religious leaders along the general theme not of reconciling evolution and Christianity but of exploring how evolution can aid, inform, and deepen religious faith.  Have listened to interviews with Ian Barbour, Dennis Lamoreaux, Ross Hostetter and Karl Giberson so far.  Very interesting, informative, and enjoyable.

Intro 2nd episode season 2 of NBC The Sing-Off "Use Somebody"

This is pure pleasure.

More Thoughts from Deeper than Darwin

Haven't posted much lately.  Work has been so demanding.  My mind in the off moments has settled on the superficial.  In some brief moments, however, have been savoring . . . slowly . . .  the book Deeper than Darwin by John Haught.  Here are some quotes that jump out or me.

This is for the new atheists:

Only cosmic literalists will claim to have read the world all the way down,  and what they take for ultimate depth sooner or later turns out to be merely  surface.

....

Speaking of Alfred North Whitehead

Physical reality in an evolving universe is  made up, he observes, of moments, events or occasions, not chunks of spatialized stuff.  It is an illusory abstraction to assume, as old-fashioned materialists  do, that the fundamental units of nature are particles of lifeless  matter. If nature is a process of becoming, then its reality is temporal; and  time, logically speaking, is composed of happenings, not atoms. What we  think of as mechanisms or bits of matter are not concretely real, but at best  useful scientific abstractions. If nature is in evolution, then its fundamentally  temporal character can be broken down concretely only into events, not materialized monads.

As one trained and entranced by science and in particular physics, where one goal is the study and the pursuit of the understanding of the tiny bits of matter that constitute everything, it is little wonder that some of us would see the world as mechanism.  But that is not the whole story.  The book his helpful in seeing that.  

The Narrative Texture of Nature - a quotation from J. Haught's "Deeper than Darwin"

Thought provoking reading from Deeper Than Darwin: The Prospect For Religion In The Age Of Evolution

Celebrated academicians, for example, often think of the cosmos as a pointless swirl of mindless stuff on which a patina of life and mind glimmers feebly for a cosmic moment.5 The narrative texture of nature still lies largely unacknowledged. However, once we develop the habit of thinking of the cosmos as a story-as geology, biology and astrophysics now demand that we do-the universe again becomes something to be read, possibly at many levels of depth. We not only now find in nature features analogous to codes, alphabets, grammars and information. We can also make out the outline of a dramatic adventure. But shall we be able to find a "meaning" written there also?

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Not if we persist in our literalism. Like all texts and stories, nature is susceptible to shallow readings that fail to get to its inner substance. Today, it seems to me, evolutionary materialism is a kind of "cosmic literalism" stuck on the surface of nature, satisfied with groundless claims that there is simply nothing beneath the "fundamental" laws of physics and natural selection. Just as biblical literalism remains content with a plain reading of scripture, the modern decision to understand the universe and the evolution of life as "merely material" is essentially a literalist flight from the depths of nature.

Today, we are all painfully aware of religious literalism and its sometimes hideous consequences. Literalism, of course, is one of the side effects of literacy.

God is moving and working in evolution to reveal his true design for humanity

The title of this post was lifted directly from Jeff's blog, where he gives profound thoughts relevant to my last two posts.  Check it out here.  He abstracted his thoughts from two podcasts he heard. I'll be thinking about it today and let take some time to soak in.

The confluence of these two thinkers - Pichon and Wright, one an orthodox Catholic the other a naturalistic agnostic - are encouraging and uplifting - both pointing, obviously unintentionally, to a reality larger than ourselves or our particular concerns but that "derives down" to imbue meaning and power in our individual existence and especially in those places and ways where we live in compassion, stand for justice, and seek to develop and support systems and institutions that advocate for the weak, the poor, the marginal and the suffering.

Scientific Literalism - An insight from John Haught

Finally, my travels are over for a while.  Last week was in Newport News, VA for a meeting related to turbine engine instrumentation.  The reception Tuesday night included a chef who made a tasty Bananas Foster on demand.  Ummm Good!

On the trip I carried a copy of God After Darwin by John Haught  and Exploring Reality:  The Intertwining of Science and Religion by John Polkinghorne.  Enjoyed both of them but the first book really whetted my appetite for more by that author.  So, while in the waiting room for my annual physical exam at work this morning, I downloaded to my Kindle, Deeper Than Darwin:  The Prospect For Religion In The Age of Evolution by John Haught.  Here is a snippet from an early chapter.  He mentions that not only is a literal interpretation of scripture pursued by many religious people but that there is an analog of that within the scientific community.

However, in a parallel way, a literalist interpretation  of nature-one that goes no deeper than Galileo's quantitative symbols or  Darwin's idea of natural selection-can also lead scientists to dismiss religion  for the shallowest of reasons. Scientific deciphering of nature has been the  occasion for great gains in knowledge, but it has also permitted the emergence   of a most soul-deadening "cosmic literalism." Our recently acquired  scientific expertise in reading the text of nature has led us into such a trancelike   fixation on surface codes and signifiers, and on life's evolutionary grammar,   that we fail to look into the depth that lies beneath them. I hope in the  following pages to burrow beneath both religious and cosmic literalism.  Only in the depth beneath the texts of nature and holy writ shall we find a  way to reconcile science and religion, evolution and the idea of God.

Now that is a new idea to me.  And, wouldn't you know that it connects with my previous post, from different authors, about how people in our age are prone to the literal view of things.   I'm looking forward to learning how he fleshes out this insight. 

Reconciling the Bible and Science: A Primer on the Two Books of God

At the advice of an Abilene Christian prof, I purchased and read Reconciling the Bible and Science:  A Primer on the Two Books of God by Lynn Mitchell and Kirk Blackard.  The two authors come from the Church of Christ.  Lynn is a religious scholar at the University of Houston and Kirk is a retired lawyer.  My prejudice will show here in what I'm about to say.  I didn't expect something this good from authors from my heritage.  The book is not about science but about interpretation of the Bible and how it relates to science.  Their position may be described as falling within theistic evolution which is where I see myself.  They find consonance with the idea that there is intelligence behind the unfolding of our universe.  But have problems with the Intelligent Design movement for various theological as well as scientific reasons.  Much of the content of the book was familiar to me but their organization and narrative was nonetheless helpful to me.  The most striking thought came in a section on literalism.  Here's a quote:

Modern Americans are generally not very good at non-literal interpretation.  Think about how few people enjoy the study of Shakespeare generation, few people enjoy or get much of out Shakespeare now because we've lost so much of our sense of symbolic, metaphorical, and mythological imagination.  We are basically literalists who tend to feel that everything not intended to be read literally is not worth spending much time on because it doesn't really tell us much.

It's been a while, but I have tried to read Shakespeare.  Maybe it was while helping one of my sons study for school.  I'd like to understand it better but it would take some investment and would require personal assistance from some one. 

Anyway, my take is that our Anglo-American heritage is very literal minded and most of us received it from the same place as Hobbes, Bacon, Newton, Locke, Thomas Paine, Thomas Reid, Alex Campbell, Foy Wallace, Bertrand Russell, Stephen Hawking, Daniel Dennett, Chris Hitchens and Sam Harris got it. 

Discovering What We Think by Writing

Have experienced blog fatigue this summer and not posted much.  Wasn't sure why i took up this blog in the first place.  It seemed like an interesting thing to explore.  Sure do enjoy reading the blogs of others.  My my, how the blog universe has changed these six years.  I did know at the beginning that writing is one way to discover and clarify what you believe and how you think.  This is backed up by something I read recently on my Kindle in a book titled Jacques Derrida by Nicholas Royle.  He says:

In the early essay 'Force and Signification' (1963), Derrida quotes the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61): 'My own words take me by surprise and teach me what I think'

Max Lucado on Fear

Am reading Fearless: Imagine Your Life Without Fear (Max Lucado)
- Highlight Loc. 268-73 | Added on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 10:35 PM

"Jesus doesn’t want you to live in a state of fear. Nor do you. You’ve never made statements like these: My phobias put such a spring in my step. I’d be a rotten parent were it not for my hypochondria. Thank God for my pessimism. I’ve been such a better person since I lost hope. My doctor says if I don’t begin fretting, I will lose my health. 

We’ve learned the high cost of fear."

Snip from Kindle from Marilynne Robinson from R. W. Emerson

Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (Marilynne Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 148-54 | Added on Sunday, June 06, 2010, 12:39 PM

Recently I read to a class of young writers a passage from Emerson’s “The American Scholar” in which he says, “In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own time,—happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly…. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.” These words caused a certain perturbation. The self is no longer assumed to be a thing to be approached with optimism, or to be trusted to see anything truly. Emerson is describing the great paradox and privilege of human selfhood, a privilege foreclosed when the mind is trivialized or thought to be discredited. The clutch of certitudes that, together, trivialize and discredit are very much in need of being looked at again.
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Great Insights by Both Authors.  I underlined something that jumped out to me.