Books Read in 2022

NON-FICTION:

The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England and The War of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors by Dan Jones

Hathaway, Oona Anne, and Scott Shapiro. The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

By Steven Pinker, 2019.

Real Americans by Jared Goldstein.

Fighting for Justice: The Improbable Journey to Exposing Cover-Ups About the JFK Assassination and the Deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Kilgallen

By Mark Shaw

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut.

The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy by Samuel L. Perry and Philip S. Gorski 

 The Sexual Reformation: Restoring the Dignity and Personhood of Man and Woman. by  Aimee Byrd. Zondervan 2022.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by Graeber, David and Wengrow, David

FICTION:

Scenes from Village Life and My Michael by Amos Oz

And Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov. Beautifully-rendered images of WWI-era Cossack life.

• A Little Lumpen Novelita by Roberto Bolaño. 
• Portrayal of household marxism briefly enough rendered to avoid becoming tedious.

Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone.  

A novel of political theology. Remarkable portrayal of 1930s Italian countryside--its amalgams of peasantry, clerisy, socialists, and fascists. While the translated dialogue seems sometimes clunky, the interweaving of religious and political symbolism is thought-provoking and deep. Applicable to the American contemporary moment of recrudescent religious fascismo.

• Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Follow Me Down, Jordan County, and Love in a Dry Season

 by Shelby Foote (a relatively and unjustly forgotten literary artist) 

Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee

The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck 

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Fantasy is not my favored literary genre, but this is about the most compellingly rendered I've encountered.

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Gaiman, Neil

Shooting Star by Wallace Stegner

A change of pace for the author by his portrayal of a frustrated female protagonist amidst damaged male antagonists (the usual Stegner specialty). Title theme and images beautifully and artistically rendered. 

The Human Factor by Graham Greene

The Professor's House, Alexander's Bridge, and Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann 

         Literary and romantic finishing school for the ingenue Hans Castorp in an asylum set in the Swiss Alps. Brilliant disquistions on romance, art, humanism, and history; a bit tedious when discussing mysticism, physiology, and recorded music. Powerful, damning, and (anti-)humanistic concluding scene as history chews up the innocent.

Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell

Grim but strangely affecting story of a family so impoverished as to become cretinous. Irredeemably? The main couple is more concerned with presenting respectability at their burial--which they perceive as imminent--than keeping up their health and decency. In landedness is their geneaology of respect disrupted by the capitalist classes, robbing them of the will and then the ability to survive.

Music of a Life: A Novel; Human Love: A Novel; and Requiem for a Lost Empire by Andrei Makine

Clandestines in the Soviet Empire's service set in relief with simple folk of the countrysides that hosted the gulag. Poignant scenes and images of love amidst senseless cruelty and crude corruption. The terror of history giving way to the silence of unfilled, grandiose, and profane dreams. Beautiful translations of French manuscripts adorned with dense psychological and historical detail.

The Idiot, The Insulted and the Injured, and White Nights by Dostoevsky

Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill

Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville.

 

NOT FINISHED

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (realized midway I had seen the movie adaptation)

Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker (pedestrian and annoying)

 OUR UNION WITH CHRIST

Rev. Dr. Douglas Olds

19 January 2022

“God is humanized in Christ, and, conversely, the human nature in Christ is deified” (Bavinck 2006, 309). As we become in union with Christ, the more we grow to fulfill the divine program for humanity in creation. Living with Jesus as Lord is to exist in union with him (we act in the Lord[’s name]): Rom. 14; 1 Cor. 6; Col. 3:17; Eph. 6:.1; Phil. 1:.21). And we die with Christ (Gal. 6:.14-15; Rom. 3) and share in his sufferings by our crucified life that we may share in his glory in the final days (Rom 8:17; 1 Pet. 4.13). Through union with Christ, we come to experience God as Christ experiences him—especially seeing God through our vision of the world as Christ sees it and us (Mt. 5: 8; 1 Jn. 3: 2). In our union with Christ, we experience active, heart, and intellectual communion with the Divine Trinity (John 14:23).[2]

Following the pattern of God dwelling among his people in the tabernacle (Exod. 25:8; 29:45; Leviticus; Numbers), Scripture prophecies the future dwelling of God among his people:

Ezekiel 43:7: “I will dwell in the midst of the people of Israel forever.”

Zechariah 2:10: “I come and I will dwell in your midst” (cf. Hag. 2:5).

John 1:14: “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

John 2:19, 22: “‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ … he was speaking about the temple of his body.”

The temple, the place where God dwells among human beings (Ps. 65:4), which the Old Testament structure prefigures, is the body of Jesus Christ. By Spiritual union to the body of Christ, we too enter and become the temple of God:

1 Corinthians 6:19: “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you.”

John 14:23: “Jesus answered him, ‘If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.’”

Eph 2:19–22: So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, 21 in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. 22 In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

Christ as sacrifice accomplishes far more in the NT. (See John 1:29, 35; 1 Cor. 5:7; Heb. 9:25-6; Rom. 3:25a). It is a cosmic atonement that includes expiation, purging, cleansing, and reparation/redemption functions. Christ is constituted as the living replacement of the temple, and where he lives, the Temple of God is also. In our union with him, we must act in our full life as dwelling continually in the temple of God as described in Exodus and Leviticus. We must pursue constant holiness and moral purity; we must avoid unclean thoughts; we must not corrupt our union with drunkenness (Lev. 8); we avoid profane speech and do not mix the pursuit of private wealth with worship of God. We must make our bodily members sacred implements for the dwelling of God (1 Cor. 12; Rom. 12; Eph. 4: 25; 2 Ti 2:14-24)—ever shining the lamp of truth and grace, making free will offerings of charity, praise, and thanksgiving. We must forgive our neighbors and make reparations for wrongdoing alongside offering to God a repentant heart. We must be constantly aware of the prods of our conscience as the central seat of the Spirit dwelling in us, which seals our confidence in redemption. Our free will offerings are voluntary acts of embodied conscience that respond directionally to the pull of Christ’s loving presence within and God’s presence in the push of love toward marginalized neighbors outside. Union with Christ is both inner-directed and outer-directed to those in need. In our union with Christ stitched by the Spirit, we are pulled toward perfection and pushed outward in love to neighbor and Christ toward virtue, justice, peace, truth, freedom, and charity.

Jesus’s humanity accompanied the Logos by learning obedience to it, so too in our sanctification we are joined and made obedient to the Logos. “He must become greater; I must become less” (John 3:30). Our ego becomes subordinated to the Logos in the way Jesus was subordinated in his human nature to God. Kenosis and condescension are salvific features of the human union with the divine Word, characteristic of the forgiven new humanity we put on in Christ.

Union with Christ is living fully inside the Word of God. Its contents become the foundation of our Spirit-guided conscience.

The Lamb of God is our way to God. He is Immanuel, God with and in union with us, who tore away the veil from the temple that kept God apart from us. In our union with Christ we have that forgiveness accomplished on the Cross and the receipt of Christ’s character and spirit/conscience in our own mortal selves, whereby we put on Christ and take off the old man (cf. Eph. 4.22-4; Col. 3:10). Our redemption was accomplished on the Cross by his pure blood (Eph. 1:7; Heb. 9:22; 1 Jn. 1:7), the righteousness of whom then flows to us—as a mystery of eternal love--in our Spirit-led conscience and consciousness of Him.

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[2] The breakdown of divisions--such as those of subject/object, ideational representation/thing in itself, sensation/mental  picture, divine/creature—is processively teleological and organicizing, the circulation of blood in the life of the flesh, and of the circulation of the Spirit in communion with God. Processive organicism in the union with Christ is thus deeply and necessarily ethical. Healing of agonism’s dysfunctions is founded on righteous ethics (Ps. 85, esp.10b). At the eschaton, the integration of these circulations of spirit and matter fulfills, and is fulfilled in, the Absolute Logos as God becomes all-in-all (Col. 3:11; 1 Cor. 15:28), a process that involves dying to self as the initiation of sacrificial deontological ethic--.“dying to the self” and its desires:

 Gal. 2:20  I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Luke 9:23  And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.

Luke 14:33  So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.

1 Cor. 15:31

I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day!

Rom. 6:3-11

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. ...

Php. 1:21  For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

Luke 14:27  Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.

Rom. 12:1 (=Heb. 5: 1-10 + Rom. 8.29) I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

Col. 3:3

John 12:24-26

     The psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom (1989, 21) warns against love that “fuses” two parties: “One of the great paradoxes of life is that self-awareness breeds anxiety. Fusion eradicates anxiety in a radical fashion— by eliminating self-awareness. The person who has fallen in love, and entered a blissful state of merger, is not self-reflective because the questioning lonely I (and the attendant anxiety of isolation) dissolve into the we. Thus one sheds anxiety but loses oneself. This is precisely why therapists do not like to treat a [care seeker] who has fallen in love. Therapy and a state of love-merger are incompatible because therapeutic work requires a questioning  self-awareness and an anxiety that will ultimately serve as guide to internal conflicts…Beware the powerful exclusive attachment to another; it is not, as people sometimes think, evidence of the purity of the love. Such encapsulated, exclusive love—feeding on itself, neither giving to nor caring about others—is destined to cave in on itself.”

Yalom, Irvin D.  Love's Executioner: & Other Tales of Psychotherapy. Basic Books, 1989.

     Yalom notes two cautions in human fusion or “union.” First, that it leads to the loss of self-awareness that would otherwise bring the guidance of normative anxiety. Second, that such fused attachments do not promote caring about others. In contrast, “union with Christ” evades both of these problems. The eternal gospel (Rev. 14:6-7) is founded in fear of the Lord, so that union with Christ does not vanquish anxiety, but instead redirects it toward its ontological source in creation. Second, union with Christ embodies love of God and other humans (Lev. 19:18; Mk. 12:30-31). Union with Christ is manifestly distinct from fusion inside human erotic relationships.

Chuck Moreau Memorial (edited)

October 20, 2021

Brazilian Room, Tilden Park, Berkeley

Rev. Douglas Olds

 Grief is a river in winter, its swollen-faced cataracts blocked by direct and ancillary cares recruited into whole-world troubles. Jagged ice floes descending on grief's rock-braided winter current pierce our brow and temple by morning. Black, they harden by evening into numbing and hardscrabble slate onto which no words can be scribbled to express what we might feel were we able—which we are not--to make comprehensible our stifled intentions to erupt with pregnant lamentation and hollow wailing.

Yet let us raise our head and look: on the banks are soft and silent pillows of snow--God has passed this way (Psalm 147:16; 68:14; Proverbs 25:13; Isaiah 1:18), deeply abides, and offers us rest in knowing that Spring will surely come. When we will thrive in the lee of the whispering Spirit that tells us that we are friends of the Lord of Life and the Living. 

 

Grace and peace to you. 

I am honored by Ann’s invitation to speak this afternoon. I was privileged to officiate the wedding of Chuck and Ann in 2012. Some of you were at that ceremony, and now we have come to a moment that celebrates Chuck’s life and legacy.  

At the wedding, I termed Chuck “the ambassador of cajun/zydeco.” Today, I’m changing that to Chuck was the Apostle of Bay Area Two-Steppin.’ In my wedding address, I delivered a message about how dance functioned to bring Chuck and Ann together in love. Today, I want to direct my message to how Chuck served to create community among dancers. 

Dance shakes free isolation and vanity and serves the transcendental of love.  Dance is ecstatic, which means to “stand outside” ourselves, opposes detachment and stoic imperturbability.  Dance’s ecstasies “unstick” us of ourselves; we make ourselves available to others.  Dance liberates the body to allow the tides of spirit to wash both inward and outward, creating wholeness –and so dance is spiritual and keeps both body and soul healthy.  

You all know this. I’m preaching to the choir here. 

But I will extend this thought with the claim that dance reveals goodness in addition to promoting health.  

Chuck by all accounts was a good man.  

I’ve been contemplating how space becomes place. Dance turns space into a place.   

           A place is recognized in the spirit that reigns in that space.  Chuck was a window to the goodness he brought to isolating spaces to make them places that reflected and spread hospitality, courtesy, patience—especially with beginners--and courage. Chuck’s spirit created community and made our spaces into places of what the ancient Israelites called shalom—where body and soul are made whole by their tying together in the spirit of God’s excellence.  

Chuck’s gentle conduct humanized our dances and helped form a healthy community.  Chuck was, to use an unfortunately outdated word, chivalrous: he noticed the presence of a person where that person could be missed, which is an act of insight and kindness. Chuck humanized what could have been a social desert by hospitality, welcome, introductions, potlucks, and modest courtesy. 

I was asked what meaning could be given to the recent spate of dancer deaths.  I was unsure how to answer, but I’ve been thinking that sometimes a cluster of deaths like the dance community has experienced may facultatively (not intentionally) ensure that we do not forget that death always looms, and that the time for stepping outside our lives is ever present to meditate on the Absolute things—God, life, love, and meaning.  What have we made of our life, and what account of it will we give to our Creator. 

        Consider this poem from T.S. Eliot that I’ve changed a bit for this occasion: 

Old men ought to be [dancers] 

Here and there does not matter 

We must be still-- and still moving-- Into another intensity 

For further union, a deeper communion… 

In [our] end is [our] beginning. 

At its most spirited, dance is the opposite of suffering.  But both, paradoxically, involve tight embraces. One CAN and should remember that both dance and suffering are relational.  By the mutually charismatic embrace of tight companioning, grief jagged and isolating can be transformed into mourning’s loving and tear-soaked recollection like lump coal a diamond. Let us consider our relationships and dancing in this way, transforming the lump coal of our estrangement and isolation into the diamonds of companionship. 

Let us consider both our grief and our dance in this way of tight, companioning embrace, recalling Chuck in our embrace as one of Creation’s gems. 

          “Dance like nobody is watching,” we are repeatedly told. I would instead say, Dance because God is watching.  Today, let’s dance and commune together like Chuck is also watching.  May it be so for you and me.

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You should never despair when you lose something, a person or a joy or happiness; everything comes back even more glorious. What must fall, falls; what belongs to us stays with us, because everything goes according to laws that are greater than our understanding and with which we only seem to contradict. You have to live within yourself and think about all life, all its millions of possibilities, widows and futures, against which there is nothing past or lost.

~Rainer Maria Rilke