The opinion piece addresses the thoughts of writer Ted Genoways.

At the same time, young writers will have to swear off navel-gazing in favor of an outward glance onto a wrecked and lovely world worthy and in need of the attention of intelligent, sensitive writers.

By way of overview – this is the opinion piece:

Pardon us for filtering out the unimaginable suffering we watch on live broadcasts with a sickening compulsion and can replay on YouTube. In the chasm between vacuous celebrity and the realities of insidious fundamentalism, perhaps it is only our own lives, logged hourly and picked over, that we can clutch on to for purpose, meaning and creative inspiration, in order to tune out the loud, fast world.

For now, might we be excused our navel gazing? When you have seen men glide down from burning towers on slipstreams of hate, perhaps it’s not too big a leap to conclude that one’s navel is the only safe place to be looking.

And to dear Ted, we are the wrecked and lovely world. It’s there in our writing if you can bring yourself to read it, and while it may not be ‘sterling’ enough for you, it’s as real as the Iraq war, and often as heartbreaking.

I find that I am struggling to hold my intense introverted and internal methods living and processing – my narcissism, with the outward looking life I desire to have. Perhaps this is why this article plucked deep hurt on the strings of my soul.

From letter 89 by Tolkien:
“…I coined the word ‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of truth…. It perceives– if the story has literary ‘truth’ –that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest fairy story– and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love…”

Cannot we find some way to correlate our local and personal sorrow and experiences of living with the greater sorrow of this world, to lean on eucatastrophe and hope – wait and live that reconciliation of the overlapping now but not yet.

There is another response (in a more literary sense) to the Harvest piece here: A response to harvest.

I met a girl on the train the other day, she was terribly intentional about starting up a conversation. It was soon established that she came from (and I wont name it) a rather large and what I’d describe as hypey church in the city. Hypey from experience. We kept talking. I turns out she works there etc. etc. Her conversation (Once she’d established I was a Christian) was loaded with Christianese and she presented the appearance of quite a settled, ‘Everything is great when you have Jesus’ life, except that it was more, ‘Everything is great when you have church’. It disturbed me

One of the reasons I’ve delayed writing this post is that I have a good old fat tendancy to be rather rude and harsh and I’m not very good at being tactful. Look I’m trying assume the best that she had a particular extroverted personality that simply expressed itself in that way. But it did progress some thoughts.

Then last night I had the chance to hear Erwin McManus speak at CityLife – a huge church (He was great btw). I struggle incredibly in going to large, very polished churches, something feels really out of whack. I’m not dissing CityLife here, they had some ripper decent theology in their songs. But big and flashy always brings the thought home.

Christianity wasn’t ever meant to be a show, and I understand that it gels with some, perhaps even fits a particular culture but to me it presents a face that feels really fraudulent and it actually scares the pants off me.

Living authentically is difficult. Talking about Jesus is difficult. I wish for my life if anything, to be brutally honest.

What happens when that doesn’t happen in our communities? When they themselves become our world. Our work, our friendships, our lives.

I know that God will probably drag me nicely across the floor in terms of being far less judgmental when it comes to alternate expressions, and I know I have much to learn from the courage and the enthusiasm of others but it’s rather complicated at the moment, because the walls fly up and render me pretty well incapable of even participating when dumped in any situation of the like. I have a terribly jaded, critical beast in me that hates what I see (badly) and hurts for the people I know who have been repelled from this institution we call church.

I want for my life to be tied to His and not simply to a beurocracy, an idea or a specific community. So much good can easily go wrong. We do need community, but it cannot become God.

Melbourne has been subject to some angry winds and a dirty brown sky due to the very tail end of a cyclone coming from the west and some Port Phillip Bay winds. Such bad winds that they canceled uni classes (I was in for all of half an hour). Truly it was more dangerous at Glenferrie than Prahran where I am but hey. My train was late (power issues) slightly expected, then the other train finished it’s trip far too early due to trees down – I grabbed a bus in quite good time only to have it arrive at the secondary stop to find the door of the bus was stuck. They finally opened it, but made us change busses (again I succeeded onto getting on quite an early one). This bus took me to the station before mine which meant yet another bus – also thankfully right there and with working doors.

I went inside for about two minutes and then drove back in towards the city to pick up Geoff who would’ve been even more stuck than me. So after leaving uni at 2:00pm, I officially ‘got home’ at 7:00pm. By then the power was out. So we went to the supermarket (the nearby one was closed due to no electricity). Just as we pulled in the drive, the street lights came on. We cheered.

So my day was all up pretty sucky (which is why you’re getting a whingy ‘this is what happened’ post) except that I met three new people at uni, caught up with a girl I know a little bit from last year and became reaquainted with another two.

Today I like people but not trains, busses or wind. And I’d really prefer it in future if the sky stayed a normal colour.

Two time delays of an hour each these past few days. Connex I am not impressed. Cut your trees or something.

The precursor to the hideous trip home was a rather splendid documentary on Michel Gondry. Of the fame of directing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep. Both of which are entirely and utterly brilliant. You haven’t seen a movie until you’ve seen them. How it has to fit with our Contemporary Design Issues class I am not quite sure, they mumbled something about the interpretations of time in media. Eh?

Prior to all of this, a day or so before infact, was our youth camp – which went quite well, despite being eaten alive by mosquitoes and getting little sleep. It was peculiar on a few levels, such as a kid who knew no-one being dropped ‘at camp’. My ‘talk’ went fine- I ended up talking about how I’ve seen God.

Before we recovered from camp, Geoff and I trotted off to lunch at Miss Marples with Beth and Bri. Jumping days: the Connex recovery was aided by a sushi dinner with Scott and Christina (and Jemima) and the introduction to Carcasonne (A little like Settlers of Catan). Yet another game we’ll maybe eventually buy.

On the way home Fred (the last remaining car) chuffed out some steam not very heroically, and had to be pushed while it cooled. We managed to drive it over the train tracks (pushing over train tracks tends to be dangerous) and get it into the station car-park. We walked home, and were stopped part way by some girls who asked Geoff to kill a spider on their car – that was funny – getting home took all of about two minutes.

This currently leaves us car-less, completely this time. Considering we were getting rid of Fred in about a month it’s not too bad, but it’s still a pain. It’ll be nice to have one that just works.

Article Here

On Thursday I bit the bullet of my, ‘avoid city driving where possible’ rule and drove to work. It’s a bit funny really, because work moved offices on Friday and of all the time I’ve been working at the Albert Park office (equivalent to almost two years), I’ve never driven in. It’s been the train and the tram with my beloved Connex. But for the sake of a free desk chair when your one has had a broken wheel for two months, you’ll do anything.

So I drove in. The right turn I was meant to make turned out to not be a right turn due to the No Right Turn sign, so I detoured somehow via Prahran (near uni) and got to work a bit late. No huge drama.

Seven and a half hours later, the chair fit nicely into my currently very dilapidated car and I set off back home. I managed to do something wrong again and wound up driving through a very busy street in the city during peak hour. Slightly terrifying, but I worked out where the freeway was fairly quickly and found the way home.

Here’s the ironic thing.

We moved offices on Friday – a few suburbs across the city to a beautiful and beautifully restored terrace house. I’ll share photos when I can. But the strange way that I drove home wound up being exactly the way I drove to the new place with Ian.

Then get this. I’ve been crapping on about how I’m in love with Barcelona chairs for a few posts now and suddenly I find out that work is getting some (replicas I assume, and they are white) but I mean what is the likely hood of that! Hearing that pulled my internal grin onto my face.

It has been a beautifully ironic weekend.

Anyway, the long and short of it was that I decided that I’d stay where I was, there were enough others on the train and he was rambling outloud quite interestingly.

“You are a slave unless you are extremely wealthy.”

“I’m only drunk because I like being drunk”

“Today I am NOT a slave!”

“We are all slaves.”

I was thinking a bit about the whole slave and free thing in the Bible – you get your typical passages along with plenty of others.

A very small bite of 2 Peter 2 (a part of the Bible I never seem to get around reading):

“They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity—for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him. ” (v.19)

and,

“I’m only drunk because I like being drunk.”

As irrational as being drunk makes you, this statement is interesting.

We often declare responsibility for our actions as a pretense for something that we truthfully cave to. It looks OK externally. We show the world our ‘in moderation’ but in all honesty we are being run by our addiction , or our ‘interests’, our ‘I’m just being helpful’, or, ‘They can’t cope without me’.

“I’m only doing it because I want to.”

We refuse to acknowledge outloud and sometimes even to ourselves that there is something else deeper that is driving us.

We are slaves to what has mastered or is trying to master us. We need to recognise what that is.

“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery… You were running a good race. Who cut in on you and kept you from obeying the truth? That kind of persuasion does not come from the one who calls you. “A little yeast works through the whole batch of dough.” (Gal 5:1,7-9)

It’s good to be aware.

There was this little boy on the train who’s mum had drawn a curly moustache on his face.

I thought that was great.

After a while the driver comes over the loudspeaker and quite matter of factly appologised, “Sorry folks, I locked myself out of the train!”

I laughed and I had company.

Sometimes I really don’t mind Connex.