By Ezra Pound

1917

*Ezra Pound was Irish, which explains the peculiar spelling choices and “Fere” means friend.

Ha’ we lost the goodliest fere o’ all
For the priests and the gallows tree?
Aye lover he was of brawny men,
O’ ships and the open sea.

When they came wi’ a host to take Our Man
His smile was good to see,
“First let these go!” quo’ our Goodly Fere,
“Or I’ll see ye damned,” says he.

Aye he sent us out through the crossed high spears
And the scorn of his laugh rang free,
“Why took ye not me when I walked about
Alone in the town?” says he.

Oh we drank his “Hale” in the good red wine
When we last made company,
No capon priest was the Goodly Fere
But a man o’ men was he.

I ha’ seen him drive a hundred men
Wi’ a bundle o’ cords swung free,
That they took the high and holy house
For their pawn and treasury.

They’ll no’ get him a’ in a book I think
Though they write it cunningly;
No mouse of the scrolls was the Goodly Fere
But aye loved the open sea.

If they think they ha’ snared our Goodly Fere
They are fools to the last degree.
“I’ll go to the feast,” quo’ our Goodly Fere,
“Though I go to the gallows tree.”

“Ye ha’ seen me heal the lame and blind,
And wake the dead,” says he,
“Ye shall see one thing to master all:
‘Tis how a brave man dies on the tree.”

A son of God was the Goodly Fere
That bade us his brothers be.
I ha’ seen him cow a thousand men.
I have seen him upon the tree.

He cried no cry when they drave the nails
And the blood gushed hot and free,
The hounds of the crimson sky gave tongue
But never a cry cried he.

I ha’ seen him cow a thousand men
On the hills o’ Galilee,
They whined as he walked out calm between,
Wi’ his eyes like the grey o’ the sea,

Like the sea that brooks no voyaging
With the winds unleashed and free,
Like the sea that he cowed at Genseret
Wi’ twey words spoke’ suddently.

A master of men was the Goodly Fere,
A mate of the wind and sea,
If they think they ha’ slain our Goodly Fere
They are fools eternally.

I ha’ seen him eat o’ the honey-comb
Sin’ they nailed him to the tree.

I won’t bother to explain this too much because: a) I’m not fluent in English, merely conversational, b) the average person’s attention span probably on got them through about half of the poem.  It will suffice to say that though this poem was written one hundred years ago its relevance for us today lies in its concern that we remember who Jesus was, not some abstruse religious figure but a son of God who bade us his brothers be.

Posted By Luke Parker

Historically there has been a great deal of debate on the subject of the Lord’s Supper.  Our Catholic brothers and sisters would speak of transubstantiation the literal ontological change, which takes place at the mass.  Christ becomes sacrificed anew at the altar and then consumed by his people.  John Calvin spoke of the great mystery of communion, that God would make himself known to human beings in some intangibly tangible way.  The Orthodox would say that the Eucharist makes the church and the church makes the Eucharist, that by taking part human beings truly become the Church at that moment.

Biblical images of food abound (Gen 6, 9:3, 27:4, Exodus 16, Psalm 23:6, 34:8, 63:4 Mark 9:1 to name only a few) and food is central to the action of Jesus.  The Gospel of John is filled with the smell of the Eucharist (meal of thanksgiving).  Jesus ministry here begins with turning water into abundant wine.  He continues to tell the woman at the well that he is “living water and the bread of life” (Chapters 2, 4, 6, 7, 13, 19, 21).  The unrecognized resurrected Jesus is made known to the disciples “in the breaking of the bread” (Luke 24:35).

I think that Communion is the great challenge to the Western minds.  The great gift and curse of the enlightenment to the church was a deep sense of the individual in relationships.  As Americans we enter churches as individuals and often stay that way. Yet it calls us “forth from our rugged individualism and self-centeredness” (Willamon) and into the Church. We are people of science and logic.  The Eucharist is deeply mysterious, clearly important but not explained.  As such it is difficult to call the Lord’s Supper “a meal” at all (calorically speaking it has little to offer).  Yet it nourishes us with his presence.  Christ was the perfect meal and in eating we remember this and He is made known to us.  In eating this meal we reject the fall, and claim community, both with Christ and with his body the Church.

written by Luke Parker

Note: In writing this I read Calvin A Short Treatise on the Lord’s Supper, William Willamon Worship as Pastoral Care, Veli-Matti Karkkainen Intro to Ecclesiology.

You may have noticed that the last several days (i.e. 13, 20, 23,24 etc) of Bread and Wine seem to be focused on the experience of Jesus and the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane.

^{Matt 26:36-38} Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.” ³⁷He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. ³⁸Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” (NIV)

I am just like the disciples here.  Jesus is only hours away from being torn to shreds for the Sin of all humankind and he asks his friends only to stay awake, while he prepares himself for certain death.  No sooner does he leave than they begin to snore, the first of several naps which are rudely interrupted by Jesus.  It seems that they have learned the wrong lesson from Matthew 8:23-27.

In Matthew 8 it is Jesus who sleeps confidently while the disciples find themselves in the midst of storm and chaos.  They fight against wind and waves until the boat is being swamped and then they cry out.  Jesus stands while the storm rages and chides them, calling them “littlefaiths.  Then calmly halts the chaos of the sea. By Matthew 26 they have become complacent, believing that having Jesus with them means that they are invincible to storms.  They miss the fact that Jesus is overwhelmed by the ominous clouds lloming on the horizon.  They sleep confidently, drunk with his blood, never imagining that Jesus is fulfilling the call he will place on the lives of every disciple.  They are a “eager to be happy with him; few wish to suffer anything for him” (Thomas a Kempis B&W 36).  They are in the words of Kierkegaard still “admirers and not followers…mak(ing) the same demands that are made in the theater: to sit safe and calm” (B&W 56-57).

For me, and likely for the Church at large, we use communion to dull minds rather than letting it quicken our hearts and spur us to greater watchfulness.  The last supper is not a sedative, it is a reminder of the claim that Grace has on our lives.  We must not abuse it, deluding ourselves  that the kingdom is far off.  It is here and now!

Want to get closer to God?  We’re beginning an intentional journey,
going deeper with God, beginning tonight.

Lent  (the word means “spring” ) is a time to prepare for the death and
resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ and to renew our life in him.
Traditionally in the Church Lent begins with the imposition of ashes
on Ash Wednesday (we make the sign of the cross, in ashes, on people’s
foreheads).  Although not a common Protestant tradition (very common
in the Roman Catholic Church), it is a powerful way to remember our
mortality, to remember the gift of Christ’s sacrifice for the
forgiveness of our sins, and to purposefully and intentionally set
aside the next 6 weeks as a time to turn toward him and draw
especially near. We’ll explain more about it at the Ash Wednesday
service.   Some people think of Lent as a time to give up something,
to sacrifice something in order to remember Christ’s sacrifice for us
(fasting – i.e. not eating chocolate or something else they enjoy for
6 weeks,; others set aside this time to take on something, to do some
things for the Lord that they haven’t been doing or haven’t been doing
as regularly or intentionally as they’d like to (prayer/scripture
reading/regular acts of mercy and justice); some do both.

On  Ash Wednesday, we’ll worship together, repent (turn away from the ways of
the world and turn toward the Lord), and we will begin a 40 days
journey towards Easter.  Worship will be meditative and intentional
toward that end.  We will encourage you to listen to what the Lord is
saying to you about how he wants you to spend the next 6 weeks – what
will most help you draw nearer to him and to the world he died to
save.  To that end we’re encouraging people to set aside 25 minutes
every day from Ash Wednesday until Easter to be with the Lord.  We’ll
have a devotional book available for those who would like the
guidance, as well as suggested scripture readings for each day.

Hopefully we’ll be posting a bit more on the blog as we reflect on Lent.  See you Tonight!

The Gosling will then follow its newly chosen “parent” around, trusting that it will provide nourishment, protection and training in the ways of Geese.  This means of course that it is critical to the health of a baby goose to imprint on the correct parent or it may never fully develop its ability to do many goosely things.

In matters of faith our experience is the same as the gosling.  The trick to becoming a mature disciple is to imprint on the correct parent.  Often in my experience with Young Life, and other ministries, students who decide to more actively pursue life as a Christian often see their leader or perhaps a minister as the source of their spiritual nourishment. However our pastors, excellent though they are, are not in fact the source of our training in the “ways of the goose.”

I think the disciples imprinted on Jesus in John 1:35-40.  I think when John the Baptist points out the “lamb of God” they are hopelessly stuck following him.  I think that this year we should pay attention to where we look for “food.”  I think Jesus wants us to “Come and See”

Yours

Luke Parker

Check out Youtube for imprinting videos.

I remember one time when I was speaking from the podium, a man way in the back of the sanctuary interrupted me.  (I was surprised, even annoyed, that someone was interrupting me.)  I stood there awkwardly for a moment and then invited him to share – briefly (please!) – what was on his heart.  He shared what the Lord had done for him – how the Lord had delivered him, at several different points, from death.  With a loud voice that carried through the large room, he joyfully recounted the goodness of God and exuberantly reiterated his love for the Lord.   He wasn’t exactly brief as he told his stories, nor was he concise in the retelling of them, but it didn’t matter.  The impact on the entire congregation, including me, was powerful.  Like the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4), this man couldn’t help but tell people about the Lord, what he had said and done.   When he finished, the congregation erupted in applause, ourselves swept up in joyful thanksgiving.

For several months, we had a different man, a little older than the first one, in his early 50’s, worshipping with us.  He wore thick lenses in his glasses and had wispy reddish-blond hair.  He lived in a shelter nearby and became friends with one of our members who helped him with many of his practical needs.  This man had a deep and almost innocent, trusting faith in Jesus Christ.  When the praise music began, he would stand up and lift his hands to heaven and sing his heart out, his body swaying back and forth.    He worshipped God with every fiber of his being – oblivious to what others were doing around him.  His spirit was loving, sincere, and beautiful.  We missed him when he was no longer there.  His worship encouraged those around him to do the same.

In an article in the Nov. 3, 2009, Christian Century, Otis Moss III, tells a similar story.  He describes an elder in his congregation (Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago) worshiping with reckless abandon, “almost as if she were possessed and made drunk by a multitude of joyous and reverent angels.  Her body became an instrument for a composition that the rest of us could only faintly hear.  She took hold of every song and prayer as if each word held the secret of life and was the key to entering the holy of holies.  She shouted, cried and talked back to the preacher with an urgency rarely seen in our tradition.  Even with our strong Pentecostal proclivities and our tradition of call and response there was something different about the nature and flavor of her worship.”  After worship he had the occasion to talk to her.  She said, “I grab hold of worship so hard because it may be my last time!”  Moss asks this question:  “What if we always worshiped, sang, prayed, read, hugged, laughed and meditated as if it were the last time?”  (p. 21)  It’s a good question, don’t you think? – In His grace, gayle

The Fate of the Spirit

The wobbly religious lives of young people emerging into adulthood.

Wall Street Journal Article 10-2-09

By NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY

College professors have been complaining about their students since the beginning of time, and not without reason. But in the past several years more than a few professors—to judge by my conversations with a wide range of them—have noticed an occasional bright light shining out from the dull, party-going, anti-intellectual masses who stare back at them from class to class. Young men and women from strong religious backgrounds, these professors say, often do better than their peers, if only because they are more engaged with liberal-arts subject matter and more inclined to study with diligence.

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The Country Today/Associated Press
Teens gather at a worship ceremony in Green Bay, Wis.
If you want to get a sense of why this might be so, look no further than “Souls in Transition,” by Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith. Examining the data from his vast longitudinal National Study of Youth and Religion, “Souls” uses statistics and face-to-face interviews to paint a picture—not necessarily a pretty one—of the moral and spiritual lives of 18- to 24-year-olds in America.

Religion, of course, does not make people smart—as Richard Dawkins and other atheists will tell you. But it does seem to save young adults from a vacuous and dispiriting moral relativism. The study’s interviews with nonreligious or semi-religious “emerging adults” tend to show vague powers of moral reasoning and a vague inarticulateness. Take this all too typical explanation from one respondent of how one might tell right from wrong: “Morality is how I feel too, because in my heart, I could feel it. You could feel what’s right or wrong in your heart as well as your mind. Most of the time, I always felt, I feel it in my heart and it makes it easier for me to morally decide what’s right and wrong. Because if I feel about doing something, I’m going to feel it in my heart, and if it feels good, I’m going to do it.”

Mr. Smith notes that the persistent use of “feel” instead of “think” or “argue” is “a shift in language use that expresses an essentially subjectivistic and emotivistic approach to moral reasoning and rational argument.” He concludes that such young adults “are de facto doubtful that an indentifiable, objective, shared reality might exist across and around all people.”

By contrast, young religious people have been made to think seriously and speak publicly about Big Questions from a young age. They do believe in a reality “out there” that can be studied and apprehended. Their answers to the study’s questions are crisper and surer than those of their nonreligious counterparts. Amanda, a young woman from a conservative Christian denomination, tells her interviewer: “First and foremost, I believe that there is a God who is all-powerful and all-knowing, who created the whole universe. I believe what the Bible says about him.”

The core of reality for students like Amanda is of course religious, but their belief in the very possibility of a nonrelativistic truth may well give a boost to their classroom seriousness, not to mention their verbal clarity.

But Amanda is unlike most members of her generation. Emerging adults in America, Mr. Smith says, are “the least religious adults in the United States today.” Only about 20% attend religious services at least once a week, a 22% decline from Mr. Smith’s survey, five years ago, of the same group of young people.

In the absence of any firm religious belief or clear idea of morality, many of the study’s subjects have decided that “karma” is the best way to make sense of the universe. By this term they mean that, as Mr. Smith puts it, “good attitudes and behavior will be rewarded in this life and bad will get what it deserves too.” The gist seems to be: “What goes around comes around.” As one student says: “Karma’s a bitch.”

It had better be, because there is apparently not much else motivating nonreligious young adults toward charitable behavior. As Mr. Smith summarizes: “Any notion of the responsibilities of a common humanity, a transcendent call to protect the life and dignity of one’s neighbor or a moral responsibility to seek the common good, was almost entirely absent among the respondents.”

Souls in Transition
By Christian Smith, with Patricia Snell
(Oxford, 355 pages, $24.95)
Read an excerpt

Mr. Smith concedes that the young people interviewed in his study don’t appear to be “dramatically less religious than former generations of emerging adults.” It is traditionally a stage in life when, without parental guidance or child-rearing responsibilities, religious ties are loosened. But the period of emerging adulthood—between young people leaving home and their marrying and setting up a home of their own—is growing longer these days, because people marry later and remain financially dependent on their parents well into their 20s. The time without steady religious observance is thus prolonged as never before.

And the costs could be high. Not only does religion concentrate the mind and help young people to think about moral questions, it also leads to positive social outcomes. Religious young people are more likely to give to charity, do volunteer work and become involved with social institutions (even nonreligious ones). They are less likely to smoke, drink and use drugs. They have a higher age of first sexual encounter and are less likely to feel depressed or to be overweight. They are less concerned with material possessions and more likely to go to college.

So why are most emerging adults so morally unmoored and religiously alienated? Mr. Smith suggests that religious institutions haven’t done a very good job at educating kids in even the most basic tenets of their faiths. And religious parents often shirk their duties, too, perhaps believing the “cultural myth” that they have no influence over their children once they hit puberty. Mr. Smith has found, to the contrary, that, when it comes to religious faith and practice, “who and what parents were and are” is more likely to “stick” with emerging adults than the beliefs and habits of their teenage friends.

Oddly, most of the respondents in Mr. Smith’s study, despite their own drifting away from religious belief, say that they expect to be more observant when they reach full adulthood and that they plan to rear their own children in their faith tradition. One young college student who spends a lot of time drinking and smoking pot tells her interviewer: “I think you should give them that, kind of rear them in some religious direction.”

—Ms. Riley is the Journal’s deputy Taste editor.

I did the bolding, I doubt that Edwards would have used his feather pen for that effect but just to be clear

So I was looking at this quote today and began to ponder the meaning of life (as I often do, being a very deep person) and I think Johnny is on to something here.  Human beings do seem to have a certain inertia.  Left to our own devices and vices we often do very little (or maybe I am revealing a bit much about how I use my free time).  Now I don’t mean to say that I believe in some “grand causality” because I don’t think the world is easily reduced only to cause and effect, the world is too peculiar for that.  I do think that God has expectations for us and deliberately intervenes in the course of history, our lives, and relationships in order to promote his divine purposes.  I believe in a God who loves us but also expects something(s) from us.  This isn’t to say that we are not saved by grace but rather that once saved by grace what will you do?  How will you respond to the great mover and shaker of the universe?  Richard Foster tells us that spiritual disciplines don’t save us but are crucil to creating “Good conditions for growth” – Celebration of the disciplines.  So if these “affections” then are like spirit manure, lets get stinky.

- The infamous Luke Parker