A video worth watching again.

Letter to Aly on Matthew West’s "My Own Little World" video

"We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!"

Recently I got an email with this quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln. Since it arrived in an email I did a little research on it. I quickly found it at Quoteworld. The most amazing place that I found it was in a book scanned by Google, The Rebellion Record by Frank Moore.

2:1 First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, 2 for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. 3 This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, 4 who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. 5 For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man [1] Christ Jesus, 6 who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time.

Passage: 1 Timothy 2 (ESV Bible Online)

This is another prayer that speaks to me. I have vowed to be prepared to give the closing prayer at our Habitat board meetings. In my case it is a written prayer that is prepared in advance. Some people are so natural when they are asked to pray. For them praying is as natural and easy as breathing. When I am asked to pray for others I panic. If the panic is strong enough I ask others to lead the prayer. It is especially frustrating that I cannot give a spontaneous prayer that echoes what I am feeling in my heart.  Trying to avoid drinking from the prayer cup does not seem to be an option to me. It has taken me some time but I have finally humbled myself to the fact that I will be called on to publicly pray for others and I need help. I am uncomfortable with this path but I trust that God has a plan for people like me. Maybe someday I will be as natural in prayer as other people.

O Lord,
I confess that I too often disregard my responsibility
to be an instrument in your hands.
I shrug my shoulders at others’ pain.
I run away from those in suffering.

Forgive me for my spiritual laziness and irresponsibility. 
Expose my warped explanations and excuses for sin and shallowness.
Weed out my sinful thoughts and actions.
Break the sinful patterns that too often entangle me and keep me from ministering as I should.

Thank you for your kingdom, your grace, your coming to rescue your creation.
Fill me with your grace and love, 
and make me a vessel through which new creation can flow out to others.
Flood the desert of my parched heart with your living water,
and may you overflow my cup so that I will be a blessing to others.
Set me apart for your purposes.
Make me into a treasured instrument for the benefit of your kingdom.
Amen.

– Trevin Wax

Flood the Desert of My Heart

I ran across this prayer a couple of days ago and my immediate thought was that it if I was asked to give the closing prayer at our Habitat board meeting I would use it. This prayer expresses a lot of the battles we confront as board members of a faith based ministry and shows that we have similar hopes as seminarians. Late on Tuesday I received a call late in the afternoon that the meeting location had changed and the President asked if I would give the closing prayer. I never cease to be amazed. Thanks Trevin!

Savior and King,
I find it so easy to revel in knowledge for knowledge’s sake,
avoiding the goal of instruction: to learn love.
A puffed-up mind may be able to hide an impure heart,
an aching conscience
or insincere motives from others,
but before you, all is laid bare.
The purpose of my training is to grow in love and faithfulness,
purity and authenticity.
Help me, O Lord, to keep in mind your purposes
for the instruction I receive.
I pray that when I leave here,
my love will have grown,
many sinful habits will have been left behind,
and any insincere motivations or spiritual facade will have been shattered.
May you work in my heart to draw me closer to yourself.
Help me to love, O Lord.
Give me a heart that breaks
for those held in the chains of sin.
Clear my conscience
and authenticate my faith. 
May the knowledge I obtain be for your glory
and for the growth of your love in my all-too-hardened heart.
And help conform me to the image of Christ, in whose name I pray. Amen.

– Trevin Wax

A Seminarian’s Prayer

O Creator of the universe,
who has set the stars in the heavens
and causes the sun to rise and set,
shed the light of your wisdom into the darkness of my mind.
Fill my thoughts with the loving knowledge of you,
that I may bring your light to others.
Just as you can make even babies speak your truth,
instruct my tongue and guide my pen
to convey the wonderful glory of the gospel.
Make my intellect sharp,
my memory clear,
and my words eloquent,
so that I may faithfully interpret the mysteries which you have revealed.

– Thomas Aquinas, (1225-1274)

A Prayer before Blogging
trevinwax
Sun, 27 Apr 2008 08:21:17 GMT

Every once and a while I wonder how we would react if someone like Jesus walked into our life. Would we act any different than the folks in the time of Jesus? If you follow this cartoon series, the guy with the funny hair was the bald, geeky guy with glasses. He is a reoccurring character in the cartoon strip. His encounter with Hay-soos has changed his appearance a little. Maybe you know a person like him in your office.

Comic for 12 Mar 2008
Wed, 12 Mar 2008 04:01:00 GMT

From the pages of the evangelicaloutpost we get this wonderful story.

This is a story about Galileo Galilei. It’s not the story about an enlightened scientist being persecuted by a narrow-minded Catholic Church because that story is (mostly) a myth. It’s not a story about a great scientific genius either, though he was that (mainly). It’s also not a story about someone being reincarnated with the soul of the old astronomer like the song by the Indigo Girls that, for a few weeks in ’92, I thought was (almost) profound. (And I should point out that it not an original story but one that cribbed together from other sources.) But like all good stories this one provides a (mostly) valuable lesson. In Galileo’s day, the predominant view in astronomy was a model first espoused by Aristotle and developed by Claudius Ptolemy in which the sun and planets revolved around the earth. The Ptolemic system had been the reigning paradigm for over 1400 years when a Polish Canon named Nicholas Copernicus published his seminal work, On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs. Now Copernicus’ heliocentric theory wasn’t exactly new nor was it based on purely empirical observation. While it had a huge impact on the history of science, his theory was more of a revival of Pythagorean mysticism than of a new paradigm. Like many great discoveries, he merely took an old idea and gave it a new spin. Although Copernicus’ fellow churchmen encouraged him to publish his work, he delayed the publication of On the Revolution for several years for fear of being mocked by the scientific community. At the time, the academy belonged to Aristotelians who weren’t about to let such nonsense slip through the “peer review” process. Then came Galileo, the prototypical Renaissance man, a brilliant scientist, mathematician, and musician. But while he was intelligent, charming, and witty, the Italian was also argumentative, mocking, and vain. He was, as we would say, complex. When his fellow astronomer Johann Kepler wrote to tell him that he had converted to Copernicus’ theory, Galileo shot back that he had too–and had been so for years (though all evidence shows that it wasn’t true). His ego wouldn’t allow him to be upstaged by men who weren’t as smart as he was. And for Galileo, that included just about everybody.

In 1610, Galileo used his telescope to make some surprising discoveries that disputed Aristotelian cosmology. Though his findings didn’t exactly overthrow the reigning view of the day, they were warmly received by the Vatican and by Pope Paul V. Rather than continuing his scientific studies and building on his theories, though, Galileo began a campaign to discredit the Aristotelian view of astronomy. (His efforts would be akin to a modern biologist trying to dethrone Darwin.) Galileo knew he was right and wanted to ensure that everyone else knew that the Aristotelians were wrong.

In his efforts to cram Copernicanism down the throats of his fellow scientists, Galileo managed only to squander the goodwill he had established within the Church. He was attempting to force them to accept a theory that, at the time, was still unproven. The Church graciously offered to consider Copernicanism a reasonable hypothesis, albeit a superior one to the Ptolemaic system, until further proof could be gathered. Galileo, however, never came up with more evidence to support the theory. Instead, he continued to pick fights with his fellow scientists even though many of his conclusions were being proven wrong (e.g., that the planets orbit the sun in perfect circles).

Galileo’s fatal mistake was to move the fight out of the realm of science and into the field of biblical interpretation. In a fit of hubris, he wrote the Letter to Castelli in order to explain how his theory was not incompatible with proper biblical exegesis. With the Protestant Reformation still fresh on their minds, the Church authorities were in no mood to put up with another troublemaker trying to interpret Scripture on his own.

But, to their credit, they didn’t overreact. The Letter to Castelli was twice presented to the Inquisition as an example of the astronomer’s heresy and twice the charges were dismissed. Galileo, however, wasn’t satisfied and continued his efforts to force the Church to concede that the Copernican system was an issue of irrefutable truth.

In 1615, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine politely presented Galileo with an option: Put up or Shut up. Since there was no proof that the earth revolved around the sun, there was no reason for Galileo to go around trying to change the accepted reading of Holy Scripture. But if he had proof, the Church was willing to reconsider their position. Galileo’s response was to produce his theory that the ocean tides were caused by the earth’s rotation. The idea was not only scientifically inaccurate but so silly it was even rejected by his supporters.

Fed up with being dismissed, Galileo returned to Rome to bring his case before the Pope. The Pontiff, however, merely passed it along to the Holy Office who issued the opinion that the Copernican doctrine is “foolish and absurd, philosophically and formally heretical inasmuch as it expressly contradicts the doctrine of Holy Scripture in many passages…” However, the verdict didn’t stand and was quickly overruled by other Cardinals in the Church.

Galileo wasn’t about to let up, though, and to everyone’s exasperation, pressed the issue yet again. The Holy Office politely but firmly told him to shut up about the whole Copernican thing and forbid him from espousing the unproven theory. This, of course, was more than he was willing to do.

When his friend took over the Papal throne, Galileo thought he would finally find a sympathetic ear. He discussed the issue with Pope Urban VIII, a man knowledgeable in matters of math and science, and tried to use his theory of the tides to convince him of the validity of his theory. Pope Urban was unconvinced and even gave an answer (though not a sound one) that refuted the notion.

Galileo then wrote A Dialogue About the Two Chief World Systems in which he would present the views of both Copernicus and Ptolemy. Three characters would be involved: Salviati, the Copernican; Sagredo, the undecided; and Simplicio, the Ptolemian (the name Simplicio implying “simple-minded”). And here is where we find our hero making his biggest blunder: he took the words that Pope Urban had used to refute his theory of the tides and put them in the mouths of Simplicio.

The Pope was not amused.

Galileo, who was now old and sickly, was once again called before the Inquisition. Unlike most suspected heretics, though, he was treated surprisingly well. While waiting for his trial, Galileo was housed in a luxurious apartment overlooking the Vatican gardens and provided with a personal valet.

In his defense, Galileo tried a peculiar tactic. He attempted to convince the judges that he had never maintained nor defended the opinion that the earth moves and that the sun is stationary and that he had, in fact, demonstrated the opposite by showing how the Copernican hypothesis was in error. The Holy Office, who knew they were being played for fools, condemned him as being “vehemently suspected of heresy”, a patently unjust ruling considering that Copernicanism had never been declared heretical.

Galileo’s sentence was to renounce his theory and to live out the rest of his days in a pleasant country house near Florence. Obviously the exile did him good because it was there, under the care of his daughter, that he continued his experiments and published his best scientific work, Discourses on Two New Sciences. He died quietly in 1642 at the ripe old age of 77.

As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “In a generation which saw the Thirty Years’ War and remembered Alva in the Netherlands, the worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.”

As Paul Harvey would say, now we know the rest of the story. So what can we learn from this tale? I think it provides different lessons for different groups of people.

For scientists it shows that if you are in agreement with most of your colleagues, you will most likely be forgotten while history remembers some crank. For advocates of Intelligent Design theory it teaches that claiming your theory is correct is no substitute for backing it up with experiments and data (even if you are right). For aggressively self-confident people the lesson is that sometimes being persistent and believing in yourself will just get you into trouble. For Catholics it provides an example of why you shouldn’t insult the Pope.

I suspect that there are many more lessons that can be gleaned from this story. But I find that the real moral is not so much in the story itself but in the fact that the story even needs to be told in the first place. While I first heard the story of Galileo in elementary school, it wasn’t until long, long after I had graduated from college that I finally learned the truth. No doubt some people are just now hearing about it for the first time. How is that possible?

I suspect it may have something to do with the fact that for centuries people like Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Carl Sagan, Bertolt Brecht, and the Indigo Girls have been passing on the myth. I don’t think any of them were intentionally lying. In fact, I doubt any of them ever bothered to examine the facts themselves. They didn’t need to. The story fit what they already believed — that science and religion were natural enemies — and that was all they needed to know.

It would be easy to mock such gullibility and intellectual laziness. But the truth is that I’m probably guilty of doing the same thing quite often. Perhaps it’s because I was a once a journalist (sort of) that I am more apt to believe whatever version of a story I find more interesting. As a newspaper editor I often favored David over Goliath, even when the powerful Philistine was more credible than the person slinging the stones. “Boy Shepherd Slays Powerful Giant” always makes for a better headline.

As a Christian, though, I don’t have the option of favoring the position that will sell more newspapers. Instead, my duty is to side with the truth. When I hear a story that fits my agenda I should examine all the relevant facts before accepting it as Gospel. I may not always be absolutely certain which side of the line the truth lays. But I do know on thing for sure: That is the side that God will be on.

Sources:

George Sim Johston, “The Galileo Affair”

John Appeldoorn, “The Myth of Galileo”

The Myth of Galileo:A Story With A (Mostly) Valuable Lesson
Tue, 05 Feb 2008 05:01:46 GMT

Michael said this (by Sister Corita Kent) was worth retyping:

1. Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
2. General duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher, pull everything out of your fellow students.
3. General duties of a teacher: pull everything out of your students.
4. Consider everything an experiment.
5. Be self-disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
6. Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
7. The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.
8. Don’t try to create and analyse at the same time. They’re different processes.
9. Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
10. “We’re breaking all of the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.” – John Cage.

Helpful hints: Always be around. Come or go to everything always. Go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully often. Save everything, it might come in handy later.

There should be new rules next week.

immaculate heart college art department rules (tecznotes)
thescoop
Sat, 02 Feb 2008 08:00:00 GMT