I submitted the following to our local newspaper, the Gazette, for consideration in its "That's Life" column. I don't know if they'll publish it - but maybe someone will read it here on my blog and like it.
Where Oh Where Has My Armoire Been?
by Stephen Brannen (in exactly 500 words)
I have always enjoyed history, its lessons, its stories, its subtle and undeniable effect on daily life. The past is wonderfully intriguing to me, and so, therefore, are things of antiquity.
Whenever I walk into a nice old building, for instance, I wax romantic, wishing I could live in such a wonderfully experienced place with all its secrets, silent memories, and forgotten knowledge. But my house is only about forty years old, and although I love my home, its history is not remarkably deep. So I have taken to romanticizing my furniture.
My wife and I love antique pieces. We have a few of them in our living room, and although for years I ignored their history, largely because I know of no way to research it, a few weeks ago I began thinking about what my furniture’s past might have been.
First I looked at the old armoire we’ve been using as a sort of entertainment center. All I know about it is that it was built by hand some hundred years ago by a craftsman who must have passed away long before I was born. But I wonder what was his story. What events were transpiring in his life while he was working on this piece? He poured his time, attention, skill, heart and personality into its construction a century ago, and now here it stands – right here in my living room in 2008.
I wonder who else has owned this armoire. Did someone hang his uniforms in here after returning from the Great War? Did children, long grown and passed on, play hide and seek in here? Who and where are the great-grandchildren of the young bride who carefully hung her wedding dress from the old wooden dowel?
It may not have sat in the White House or the Waldorf Astoria, but I’m sure my entertainment center has a rich and intricate history. It probably overheard the news of the Wright brothers’ first flight, the Titanic sinking, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the war that followed, the stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, Korea, the Kennedys, Vietnam, and certainly yesterday’s headlines.
The hardy poplar panels have been touched by the hands of people who lived in older, simpler times. Their essence has seeped into the grain along with the dark brown finish, mingling with the oil and dirt from my own hands. In this anonymous way, my family and I are connected to the residents of history.
Who knows where this elegant old closet will eventually go. Maybe it will live on after I’m gone – in the living room of some other hopeless romantic. Maybe he will wonder if an old-fashioned CD player ever sat inside it, piping old-fashioned ambient techno music through its speakers.
It’s humbling, because it makes me realize that I am, after all, just one small link in the long chain of history. But I like my place in the chain, the stories I’m making in it, and the armoire I share it with.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Monday, May 12, 2008
Creator, not magician
When I was a child – I had a childish view of God. I saw Him as a gray-bearded superman in a long white robe up in the clouds, waving His arms about while summoning lightning, wind, thunder and rain. With a blink of His eye he would cause oceans to part, dead men to rise, mountains to emerge from the sea with white-hot volcanic fury, the earth to open up and swallow the enemies of His children in a single gulp, and so on. This was, to me, how God always did things. While there were events that occurred here on earth in very unexciting, natural, explainable ways, things we see every day and understand somewhat – God's ways were always awesome in splendor, unexplainable, instantaneous, scoffing at the laws of physics and nature as if He were their enemy.
As I have grown, I have begun to see God a little differently. Although I believe He can do everything I just mentioned, if He so chooses, I now think that, perhaps, He generally prefers to do His will in ways that seem less dramatic to us. Now – I think we all know this, but I’m not sure the world understands that we do. I think the world sees our God (or our perception of Him) as the great magician in the sky. Anything miraculous, explanation-defying, bewildering...well, that’s God’s doing. Of course, when people study the nature of things they often discover that, lo and behold, there’s a natural and logical cause for what we once chalked up to supernatural handiwork. Then they say, “See – it wasn’t God after all,” leaving us, they presume, to grapple with doubt.
Sadly, we sometimes do just that, or we stand tall in our faith (as we should) and move on. I don’t believe, though, that the doubt-casters are necessarily wrong in their understanding of the natural manifestations of what we know is God’s work – but, rather, they simply don’t see God in it. This is because they believe (and so do many Christians) that God only does magic. The more “magic” man’s wisdom can explain, the more God seems to disappear.
WRONG! God is not a magician. He created not just this earth, but the very laws and natural forces that affect it and every bit of matter (or anti-matter) in the universe. Why? Because He’s a Creator, not a magician. Magicians wave their arms and, poof, rabbits just appear (or seem to). They can’t actually conceive of rabbits, decide how they should be formed, deploy and manage the processes by which they form, then oversee these processes to their full completion in the form of a little white bunny. That...only God can do. And without Him – it will not happen. Ever.
God also installed in us, His creation, this very creative nature of His, so that we might relate to Him a little. Let’s examine, for a moment, this human impulse to create. Imagine an artist is given a magic wand. All he has to do is think of a picture, wave the wand, and the image will appear on the canvas exactly as the artist imagined it. No more mixing colors, no more tedious and laborious work, no more patience. Do you think an artist would be interested in having this wand? As an artist myself, I can tell you that the answer is “no.” Oh, maybe for that fluffy commercial stuff artists have to throw together to put food on the table – but never would an artist, a creative expresser, lazily bypass the process of creation of a masterpiece. Where’s the love in that? Every stroke has to be loving and painstaking – bearing his mark, his personality, himself. And so I wonder if God is like this, too.
Consider this familiar type of scenario. A woman in the church has a dire need for a $2000 medical procedure. She brings the need to the church and the church prays for her. A man in the church offers to prepare her taxes for her and discovers that she is completely unaware of the many tax benefits available to her. So he does her taxes and her refund check is a whopping $1500. That combined with the collection of a love offering pays for the operation. So...did God do this? Did He answer the prayers of His people? Well, not the god the world thinks we believe in. But we know that God did answer those prayers. There was no magic, no mystery that defies explanation, no instant gratification, but God did His work. Could He have made the money instantly and mysteriously appear in her bank account? Yes. So then why didn’t He? Because, I think, He’s a Creator, not a magician. He created processes so he could use them. He created us so He could use us. That’s His nature.
When I was a child I would have asked, “Why would God go through all that when He could just make things appear?” Now, as an artist, I ask, “Why would God just make things appear when He can actually Create them?”
Brothers and Sisters, God can do all things, but we will never understand, in this life, why and how and when. Remain faithful and someday, as Dottie Rambo wrote, we shall behold him. Keep reaching through.
As I have grown, I have begun to see God a little differently. Although I believe He can do everything I just mentioned, if He so chooses, I now think that, perhaps, He generally prefers to do His will in ways that seem less dramatic to us. Now – I think we all know this, but I’m not sure the world understands that we do. I think the world sees our God (or our perception of Him) as the great magician in the sky. Anything miraculous, explanation-defying, bewildering...well, that’s God’s doing. Of course, when people study the nature of things they often discover that, lo and behold, there’s a natural and logical cause for what we once chalked up to supernatural handiwork. Then they say, “See – it wasn’t God after all,” leaving us, they presume, to grapple with doubt.
Sadly, we sometimes do just that, or we stand tall in our faith (as we should) and move on. I don’t believe, though, that the doubt-casters are necessarily wrong in their understanding of the natural manifestations of what we know is God’s work – but, rather, they simply don’t see God in it. This is because they believe (and so do many Christians) that God only does magic. The more “magic” man’s wisdom can explain, the more God seems to disappear.
WRONG! God is not a magician. He created not just this earth, but the very laws and natural forces that affect it and every bit of matter (or anti-matter) in the universe. Why? Because He’s a Creator, not a magician. Magicians wave their arms and, poof, rabbits just appear (or seem to). They can’t actually conceive of rabbits, decide how they should be formed, deploy and manage the processes by which they form, then oversee these processes to their full completion in the form of a little white bunny. That...only God can do. And without Him – it will not happen. Ever.
God also installed in us, His creation, this very creative nature of His, so that we might relate to Him a little. Let’s examine, for a moment, this human impulse to create. Imagine an artist is given a magic wand. All he has to do is think of a picture, wave the wand, and the image will appear on the canvas exactly as the artist imagined it. No more mixing colors, no more tedious and laborious work, no more patience. Do you think an artist would be interested in having this wand? As an artist myself, I can tell you that the answer is “no.” Oh, maybe for that fluffy commercial stuff artists have to throw together to put food on the table – but never would an artist, a creative expresser, lazily bypass the process of creation of a masterpiece. Where’s the love in that? Every stroke has to be loving and painstaking – bearing his mark, his personality, himself. And so I wonder if God is like this, too.
Consider this familiar type of scenario. A woman in the church has a dire need for a $2000 medical procedure. She brings the need to the church and the church prays for her. A man in the church offers to prepare her taxes for her and discovers that she is completely unaware of the many tax benefits available to her. So he does her taxes and her refund check is a whopping $1500. That combined with the collection of a love offering pays for the operation. So...did God do this? Did He answer the prayers of His people? Well, not the god the world thinks we believe in. But we know that God did answer those prayers. There was no magic, no mystery that defies explanation, no instant gratification, but God did His work. Could He have made the money instantly and mysteriously appear in her bank account? Yes. So then why didn’t He? Because, I think, He’s a Creator, not a magician. He created processes so he could use them. He created us so He could use us. That’s His nature.
When I was a child I would have asked, “Why would God go through all that when He could just make things appear?” Now, as an artist, I ask, “Why would God just make things appear when He can actually Create them?”
Brothers and Sisters, God can do all things, but we will never understand, in this life, why and how and when. Remain faithful and someday, as Dottie Rambo wrote, we shall behold him. Keep reaching through.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Tell the ancient story
This weekend we had our lawn aerated by a fellow who is a Vietnam vet. He was a very interesting guy, so instead of letting him do his job in peace I had to follow him around and chat with him. Somehow he brought up the subject of the ancient Sumerian texts and the Anunnaki, their gods who are said to have been aliens who cultivated human life on Earth. I later went on-line to research this business a bit, as it challenges what we believe. What I found inspired me to write this blog.
I can’t say much about the Sumerians other than they lived near the Tigris-Euphrates region (Eden’s vicinity) and were reportedly the first civilization on Earth – the precursors to the Assyrians and Babylonians. Their writings date back to 3000-2000 B.C. Their written language is one of if not the oldest. Although their concepts of God are different in many ways from those of the ancient Hebrews, their historical accounts are very similar.
The reason I bring this up at all is that while I did my tiny amount of research, I repeatedly came across a common challenge to the accuracy and reliability of the Bible. It goes like this: There were accounts of the flood, tower of Babel, creation, giants (the Sumerian texts refer to them) and many other unverified events and people long before Genisis was alleged to have been written by Moses – so, clearly, Moses borrowed these stories from other sources and adapted them to his own writings (if he could even write at all, the argument asserts). His inspiration, supposedly, would have come not from God but from other earlier religious writings. Therefore, no God. Therefore, leave me alone and let me wallow in my sin. (Okay, that’s my own little embellishment)
This notion rears its head often, doesn’t it? "Other people wrote it first, so your ‘God’ is just a copy of earlier myths." People who proclaim this rely heavily upon the arrogant belief that what we know now about history is so much more reliable than what people who lived it have told us. But here is a fact they seem to ignore: stories do not necessarily begin when they are written down. Genesis is not a "novel" such that it was conceived entirely by a man with a pen and paper. Genesis was a story, or collection of stories, that had been passed down (very probably in a meticulous manner) for generations. Other ancient stories (including famous Greek epics) were passed down this way as well. In ancient times, before writing existed, oral memory was seriously superior – far more reliable than the "whisper" experiment often performed in college classrooms. Eventually these stories were codified in writing, but that codification was by no means their beginnings. So what were the beginnings of the Sumerian stories? I doubt they were never told before they were written – in fact I’m certain (despite absence of scientific proof) that all the ancient "myths" and stories were circulating orally for centuries before the first religious texts materialized. From whence did they begin?
Here’s my answer to that question – "They all came from a common source." If this were so, wouldn’t most of the major religions of the world have some commonalities? Wouldn’t some stories overlap? The fact that the similarities exist, despite man having been sequestered into isolated "non-overlapping" regions and cultures for centuries, is a strong support for the belief that man, wherever and whatever his roots, once had a common story, religion, mythology, whatever you want to call it. Is it possible that, of all the branches, threads, evolutions and changes in religions across geography and time, that one thread might have survived which contained the original untainted story? Of course some would say "no," but I believe "yes." I believe it was the ancient descendants of Shem, then Abraham, Isaac, Jacob (Israel), who kept the accuracy intact. Can I prove it? No, but there is historical evidence to support it that is seemingly just as strong as the evidence against it.
So we’re again left with a measure of faith. Naturalists, scientists (some), humanists don’t embrace faith. But, brothers and sisters, there are holes, big ones, in our understanding and knowledge of this world and the universe in which it resides. Without faith we are severely limited to a belief system that is clearly too small for the spirit of man to settle for. I believe we weren’t created to settle for the little our minds can wrap themselves around. We were, in fact, created by God to love and fellowship with Him, regardless of our limitations by intellect and doubts by ignorance. Believe, never waver. Someday we will see Him and there will be an enormous "Oh yeah – now I get it." Until then, let us continue to tell the ancient story of His love and reconciliation to us, now through Christ.
Peace and Blessings.
I can’t say much about the Sumerians other than they lived near the Tigris-Euphrates region (Eden’s vicinity) and were reportedly the first civilization on Earth – the precursors to the Assyrians and Babylonians. Their writings date back to 3000-2000 B.C. Their written language is one of if not the oldest. Although their concepts of God are different in many ways from those of the ancient Hebrews, their historical accounts are very similar.
The reason I bring this up at all is that while I did my tiny amount of research, I repeatedly came across a common challenge to the accuracy and reliability of the Bible. It goes like this: There were accounts of the flood, tower of Babel, creation, giants (the Sumerian texts refer to them) and many other unverified events and people long before Genisis was alleged to have been written by Moses – so, clearly, Moses borrowed these stories from other sources and adapted them to his own writings (if he could even write at all, the argument asserts). His inspiration, supposedly, would have come not from God but from other earlier religious writings. Therefore, no God. Therefore, leave me alone and let me wallow in my sin. (Okay, that’s my own little embellishment)
This notion rears its head often, doesn’t it? "Other people wrote it first, so your ‘God’ is just a copy of earlier myths." People who proclaim this rely heavily upon the arrogant belief that what we know now about history is so much more reliable than what people who lived it have told us. But here is a fact they seem to ignore: stories do not necessarily begin when they are written down. Genesis is not a "novel" such that it was conceived entirely by a man with a pen and paper. Genesis was a story, or collection of stories, that had been passed down (very probably in a meticulous manner) for generations. Other ancient stories (including famous Greek epics) were passed down this way as well. In ancient times, before writing existed, oral memory was seriously superior – far more reliable than the "whisper" experiment often performed in college classrooms. Eventually these stories were codified in writing, but that codification was by no means their beginnings. So what were the beginnings of the Sumerian stories? I doubt they were never told before they were written – in fact I’m certain (despite absence of scientific proof) that all the ancient "myths" and stories were circulating orally for centuries before the first religious texts materialized. From whence did they begin?
Here’s my answer to that question – "They all came from a common source." If this were so, wouldn’t most of the major religions of the world have some commonalities? Wouldn’t some stories overlap? The fact that the similarities exist, despite man having been sequestered into isolated "non-overlapping" regions and cultures for centuries, is a strong support for the belief that man, wherever and whatever his roots, once had a common story, religion, mythology, whatever you want to call it. Is it possible that, of all the branches, threads, evolutions and changes in religions across geography and time, that one thread might have survived which contained the original untainted story? Of course some would say "no," but I believe "yes." I believe it was the ancient descendants of Shem, then Abraham, Isaac, Jacob (Israel), who kept the accuracy intact. Can I prove it? No, but there is historical evidence to support it that is seemingly just as strong as the evidence against it.
So we’re again left with a measure of faith. Naturalists, scientists (some), humanists don’t embrace faith. But, brothers and sisters, there are holes, big ones, in our understanding and knowledge of this world and the universe in which it resides. Without faith we are severely limited to a belief system that is clearly too small for the spirit of man to settle for. I believe we weren’t created to settle for the little our minds can wrap themselves around. We were, in fact, created by God to love and fellowship with Him, regardless of our limitations by intellect and doubts by ignorance. Believe, never waver. Someday we will see Him and there will be an enormous "Oh yeah – now I get it." Until then, let us continue to tell the ancient story of His love and reconciliation to us, now through Christ.
Peace and Blessings.
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