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I got a truly lovely YouTube video of an Icelandic hymn from my husband who found it at John Scalzi’s website. Based on information in the comments at Scalzi’s site, the poem is from the 13th Century but the music was written in the 1970s.
At least a couple of the commenters at YouTube gave translations and one also gave some background information:
Hear creator of the heavens
what the poet begs.
Come softly to me
your mercy.
I trust in you,
you have created me.
I am your servant
you are my lord.
God, I trust in you
to heal me.
For the least, my king,
we need you the most.
Take, my God,
so powerful and inquisitive,
the sorrow out of our hearts.
My king, watch over me,
we need you the most.
For every moment
to hold ground.
Set the son of a maiden,
a beautiful matter.
All the help from you
in my heart.
This is written in a very violent time in the Sturlunga-age in Iceland. A few families were having disagreements over power and the man who wrote this poem was a member of one of those families. He was in the Ásbirninga family and his name was Kolbeinn Tumason. It is said that he wrote this just prior to "Víðinesbardagi", a battle in 1208. He said this poem over and over, so often that the people around him memorized it.
I smiled at “He said this poem over and over, so often that the people around him memorized it.” Since the commenter’s name seems to be Scandinavian, I assume he want to be sure non-Scandinavians understand bards and oral traditions. It’s rather sweet of him, I think.
I have from time to time read - or attempted to read - writings by modern atheists. My most notable attempt - and failure - involved reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I didn’t get very far into before giving up. I simply could not figure out what he was writing about; it certainly didn’t seem to be God or theology or religion as I understood it. I could only assume that Dawkins’ entire exposure to religion consisted of regular attendance at the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Still, from to time, I worried that perhaps I was missing something, that there was some brilliant intellectual understanding on the part of Dawkins and his fellow atheists that I simply could not comprehend. I was therefore relieved and delighted to run across a piece by David Bentley Hart at First Things. Writing in response to an “[ostensible] survey of recently published books on (vaguely speaking) theism and atheism,” authored by Adam Gopnik and published in the New Yorker, Hart believes that:
Simply said, we have reached a moment in Western history when, despite all appearances, no meaningful public debate over belief and unbelief is possible. Not only do convinced secularists no longer understand what the issue is; they are incapable of even suspecting that they do not understand, or of caring whether they do. The logical and imaginative grammars of belief, which still informed the thinking of earlier generations of atheists and skeptics, are no longer there. In their place, there is now—where questions of the divine, the supernatural, or the religious are concerned—only a kind of habitual intellectual listlessness.
“[T]hey are incapable of even suspecting that they do not understand, or of caring whether they do.” To me, that sums up modern atheists perfectly.
Hart concludes:
Principled unbelief was once a philosophical passion and moral adventure, with which it was worthwhile to contend. Now, perhaps, it is only so much bad intellectual journalism, which is to say, gossip, fashion, theatrics, trifling prejudice.
Do read the whole thing. It is delightfully acidic and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.
(Via The Gormogons)
Back in early December, in a comment (December 7, 2012 09:14 PM) over at Villainous Company, Grim said about a friend of his:
I'm not sure just how she does see the sacred, except that I know she sees it in relationship. I know this because she defines Logos as "relationship," which isn't entirely wrong: but let me draw the issue. Logos is the Greek for 'word,' and is the term used in the opening of the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God." So it's an important term.
Logos is related to our word for "logic," as well as being the actual word for "word," and in the Greek it has a strong connotation of order; but "relationship" is an interesting reading. And yet it's right, in a way. Logic is about ordering things correctly; and order is a kind of relationship, one to another, each in their place but in just the right 'relationship' to each other.
The idea of seeing the sacred in relationship reminded me at the time of something I’d read (probably in The Reason for God ) about the Triune God. As I remember it, the idea was that the three aspects (for lack of a better word) of God - Father, Son, and Holy Ghost - were in a constant dance with each other, each loving, glorifying, and delighting in the others.
This idea came up again (in somewhat different form) in the C.S. Lewis I'm currently reading which inspired me to do a little research. It turns out this is the idea of “perichoresis” (emphasis mine):
The fact that Father, Son and Holy Spirit bring glory to each other is precisely because of the love that they share in eternity, since to exalt the other is a supreme act of love. And pushing further still, I would suggest that a doctrine given a rather complicated Greek name, perichoresis, provides the best framework for understanding the Trinitarian form of God's glorification. This is the doctrine that the Persons of the Triune Godhead mutually indwell one another, and seems—although the biblical data are very faint—to suggest that the characteristics of the Godhead flow out of this perichoretic union.
I do not know, of course, if this is what Grim’s friend is thinking of when she sees the sacred in relationship but I like very much the idea of the sacred arising from an eternal dance. That seems quite perfect.
The Anchoress (via NRO) has up a rant about first responders and clergy being excluded from the commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. It speaks for itself and I have nothing to add to that aspect of it.
I was, however, taken aback by this statement from one of the articles she links:
During the 2001 "Prayer for America" service at Yankee Stadium, leaders from the major religions—Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Protestants, Sikhs, Greek Orthodox—addressed the crowd of thousands and an even larger TV audience from a podium atop second base.
"I brought every major religion to this event in Yankee Stadium," said Mr. Washington, who is considering holding a news conference on Sept. 11 to object to the exclusion of clergy.
"I'm very upset about it," he said. "This is crazy."
It seems to me that if Mr. Washington is upset because he believes people would benefit from prayer on this sad and solemn occasion then the appropriate thing to hold would be not a news conference, but a prayer service. Or lots of prayer services at lots of houses of worship, perhaps at the same time as the official ceremony and including sincere, loving prayers for all those who were touched by this disaster. I think it would be a particularly nice touch if the first responders were warmly invited to these services.
There are two verses I remember from Sunday School that cover this situation pretty thoroughly:
But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.
It seems worth nothing that the latter verse ends:
And they marvelled at him.
I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance, or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others. - Thomas Jefferson
In this article (via BlueLyon) the author sets out to demolish “3 Silly Religious Beliefs Held By Non-Silly People” - “three widely held beliefs of modern progressive and moderate believers: beliefs held by intelligent and educated believers who respect science and don't think religion should contradict it.” In other words, silly beliefs held by the good guys. The beliefs she goes after are:
1) Evolution is guided by God.
2) There is an immaterial soul that animates consciousness
3) The universe is sentient, apparently also expressed as a belief in a “World-Soul”
I know absolutely nothing about the third belief she lists and have nothing to say about it. I found her specific arguments against the first two beliefs interesting but unsophisticated, somehow off-focus. I have no background in theology but it sounds to me as if she’s arguing more against her image of these beliefs than against the actual beliefs as they exist within a coherent religious framework particularly in her comments about an immaterial soul. Still what really struck me about her article was her conclusion and that’s what I want to address.
After first commenting on the author’s woefully inadequate analogy of evolution as a kitchen redesign. Capital “E” evolution strikes me as being remarkably similar to how a computer program evolves: you start with a program designed to do one thing and as you add functionality you are constrained by the need to insure that the existing code continues to work. This means you end up with some very elegant code, some inelegant but serviceable code, some very odd code, some very inefficient code, and some code that appears to be totally unnecessary but that everyone is afraid to rip out for fear it’s doing something important somewhere. Occasionally you mumble - or scream - that the only smart thing to do is scrap the whole system and start from scratch but deep in your heart of hearts you know that the system is now so complex you probably couldn’t recreate it if you tried. And, hey, the system pretty much works. (Note that my analogy explains seahorses which I think is more than anyone else can do. Seahorses are what happens when you’ve been pulling all-nighters for too long and need to write some code that reminds you how much fun programming can be. We mortals come by our playfulness honestly.)
Now about the article’s conclusion:
If you're going to be a moderate or progressive religious believer; if you're going to be a religious believer who respects and supports science instead of treating it as the enemy; if you're going to be a religious believer who wants their beliefs to at least not be directly contradictory with the available scientific evidence... then you need to be willing to consider the possibility that your own beliefs are every bit as contradicted by that evidence as the beliefs of the fundamentalist crazies.
And if the answer is "yup, that belief seems to be contradicted by the evidence"... then you need to be willing to let go of that belief.
So you see it doesn’t matter if you support every item on the moderate - even the progressive - agenda; it doesn’t matter if you staunchly oppose even the slightest hint of religion creeping into education or the public square; it doesn’t matter if you rally, march, and vote for every penny of funding desired by the scientific establishment; it doesn’t matter if you accept every claim of the scientific establishment as Holy Writ. So long as you harbor impure thoughts you are unfit to consider yourself a communicant in the great church of moderate and progressive religious believers. You are a heretic. You are the enemy.
I wonder what religious beliefs this author would permit moderate and progressive religious believers to cling to while still allowing them the privilege of communion with the great congregation of Respect for Science and Separation of Church and State. And has she informed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that some of their silly beliefs are going to have to go?
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