By the time it publishes, I shall have defended my undergraduate thesis the day before and shall, at this point, be curled up somewhere very sound asleep. The nature of my thesis is strange; it is entitled, “The Poetics of God: Exegesis and Story in Six Parables of Christ” and what I accomplished, or at least made strives to accomplish, was in the first chapter a rather extensive survey of the exegetical tradition of the Church Fathers and the Western medievals, up until about the fifteenth century, followed by three chapters in which I proceeded to, through imitation of their tradition of commentating, exegete six parables on my own.

And in the process, I engaged a particular method and thought of approaching Scripture, one that I should like to try and articulate to you now.

But this is complicated, as I am essentially presenting to you an apologia of how I think, which is perhaps best described as an artist. So I have sought rather to paint out this idea of our approach to reading the Scripture, in hopes that what I leave you with is, somehow, a glimpse into a method of reading that reverences our Lord and His Scripture.

(A bit of an explanatory note, an insight into how to read my sort of painting, is that golden bronze ovaloid you see is always the spirit of God, as Father, Christ, or Holy Ghost.)

“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

To approach Scripture well, we must approach the cosmos well. Matter, this created universe, was not conceived in neutrality. God called forth the whole of the creation and each time pronounced it Good. When we read the Scripture, we must read it with the mind that the whole of this world bares the gift of His creativeness, that by Him, we call it a law that the entropy of a system approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches zero; that the sin²θ + cos²θ = 1; and, that two hyrdogen atoms bound polarly to one oxygen to give us water, and by Him these things, too, were pronounced good. And in the Fall, it was not merely a spiritual fall, but our bodies fell, death entered the world, and with our bodies the whole of the cosmos: birds, bumble bees, and nucleotides all bare the consequence of the entrance of sin and death into the world. And if we are to read the Scripture holistically, we must understand that it does not seek to comment on a spiritual condition in the abstract, or upon us alone, but on the whole of that which was created, the very matter of the chair you are sitting in right now.

Keep reading with me, today, at Deeper Story …

© 2012, Preston. All rights reserved.

The form pride takes can be surprising.

There was a time when I attended a problematic church–let’s call it The Church of the Windowless, Likely Resurrection–which prided itself on everything it wasn’t. This is the typical model of most emergent movements within the modern Church: the body is defined by everything it disagrees with. (Ironically, radical fundamentalists are of the same philosophical stripe.) Phrases like burned by the church and the Bible as conversation starter are vogue. This is problematic. This is, often, incredibly irreverent.

But I said pride can take surprising forms, and while The Church of the Windowless, Likely Resurrection prided itself on what it wasn’t, I prided myself on everything I thought I was.

I first began attending St. Paul’s Episcopal Church two and a half years ago, which I attended for a little while concurrently with The Church of the Windowless, Likely Resurrection. Before that, I was raised by some very delightfully strange Baptists who viewed Communion with serious reverence, but referred to it more often than not as The Lord’s Supper.

For awhile after I first started at St. Paul’s, I carried the word Eucharist around like it was a weapon. Anytime I was with anyone, I saw fit to forgo other words like Communion or Lord’s Supper in favor of the “right” word for the act of worship. Even if the other person had used Communion the entire time they spoke, even if their theology of Communion was beautiful, I insisted on calling it the Eucharist, in a kind of pointed, knowing way.

I did this mostly with my parents.

Keep reading this today, at Deeper Story.

© 2012, Preston. All rights reserved.

Depending on whom you ask, it’s the hot topic in the Church these days.

What are we to do with the women?

Whether it’s long and ridiculous lists outlining what constitutes an important enough position in a church to determine if a woman should be allowed to fill it or a much more thoughtful series of reflection, such as that being hosted by Ed Cyzewski, the blogosphere has done nothing but exacerbate our collective access to every opinion under the sun as to how we are to actually read Corinthians or Timothy or what culturally historical position should be taken to reinterpret into today’s context or … and it goes on.

And I must confess to you, I’m not sure which camp I completely fall into.

I have written in the past some particularly pointed posts in which I advocate a strongly feminist position, if we are going to define feminist as someone who recognizes a woman to be in fact human, moreover made in the image of God. Indeed, many of my friends around the blogs are women who have no qualm asserting themselves as egalitarian.

And I love them, I love what they do, I love how God works through them.

But today I want to come clean.

I want to confess to you that I haven’t fully made up my mind. I still need time to think and pray. For I am at heart, I think, a complimentarian. At least in so far as I think men and women do have complimentary roles to one another in marriage. Now if that means that I have to say only women should stay home or that a man is the only one allowed to work, then cast that label aside and find something else to call me. But if egalitarian means that anything a man can do a woman can do with no qualification whatsoever …

Part of me cries YES! and part of me cries NO!

I am not the person who has read an NIV version of Corinthians and Timothy and made a case for gender roles in church based on translation. I have read the Greek, I have read under people who read the Greek from both sides of the camp, and I am still pondering and praying it out.

But I can tell you what I do know. At least, what I know right now. I can share some of the threads that weave my soul.

Keep reading and join me, today, over at Deeper Story?

© 2012, Preston. All rights reserved.

And we came to the speed bumps.

“Honey, it’s alright. Just go over them slow,” she tells me, but I can see out of the corner of my eye the flicker of trauma remembered shadow her face and wordlessly I take the wheel and turn it left, driving down to the end of the row where I turn right and then right again for the simple sake of avoiding the speed bumps.

The drivers behind us are slightly confused, as two cars that were waiting have already gone over by the time we are back on the other side. If we were like everyone else, we would have driven over the speed Bumps in the parking lot of Portofino like there was nothing to even pause and consider.

But we are not like everyone else.

Keep reading and join me over at Deeper Story today?

© 2011 – 2012, Preston. All rights reserved.

I pool myself on the table in front of him to try and make him understand, which is silly, because he does. But I have come to think that metered words and breathed prose somehow makes sense of my tangled mess of being, that I have to explain myself aloud, neglecting the power of the sacrament of the unspoken word—things betrayed and conveyed in eyes, in half-nods, in unspoken prayers.

“He’s silent,” it’s more choked than I would have liked, but this is part of the unspoken revelation, too. It’s been this way since September, a feeling that God is abundantly present, a sense of peace in the very core of my soul, and yet no kindling tickle of wings against my heart, against my being, so that I am caught betwixt an absolute certainty and trust that He exists, that He saturates the cosmos, but these truths, this Truth, does not feel present, does not feel true.

And I’m desperate. Eyes betray, convey.

I fear the future. I fear that He has led me into a time of such profound certain uncertainty, that this ground beneath my feet feels so absolutely solid and yet each step forward into darkness feels as if it could be a step off into the abyss.

And I pool. I pool all this in mangled words in front of him and he understands, but I keep talking, because what I’m not saying is that I’m scared and talking about it helps me be less afraid. At least, I think it does. I’m not certain of much apart from Him in this strange land of exile.

Join me on this journey today, over at Deeper Story?

© 2011, Preston. All rights reserved.

We near that time in the year when Church and secular conflate with regard to the holidays and it becomes, at times, hard to distinguish them. As we near the close of October, I find myself thinking on evil, evil and what evil means. Or doesn’t. Is. Or isn’t.

One year at a local church’s Fall Festival—one of the valiant, though often unfortunate, attempts to reclaim All Saints Day and All Souls Day from Halloween—I was greeted by a boy dressed up as the devil. At least, his conception of him. Pitchfork in hand, horns on his head, red cape on his back, and a defiant look of satisfaction on his face.

“And what are you supposed to be?” I asked him, while at the same time encouraging yet another child to throw their fishing line—string with a clothespin affixed to a stick—over into the sea—a blue sheet with cutout fish taped to it—to see what they could catch—candy attached to a fish cutout that a very kind, very bored volunteer would time and again place into the expectant clothespin, then give a little tug and put up a playful fight before letting go to the victory shout of the child.

“I’m Satan!” declared the boy, sounding horrifically triumphant.

I was amused. “You are most obviously not.”

Keep reading with me here?

© 2011, Preston. All rights reserved.

For my first post, I am reflecting on our need for Christ to be crucified, even now …

—

“Give peace in our time, O Lord. Because there is none other that fighteth for us, but only thou, O God”

We gather in the small chapel with the stained glass windows to pray the evening liturgy. There are no kneelers, so our flesh kisses the stone floor and goes numb. At that level, eyes are placed just below the columns of glass that overlook the altar. At that level, eyes are placed just below the central image woven into the glass: our Lord Christ, crucified.

Today, I think about Somalia and famine. Today, when we read the appointed psalm, I think about my friends in closed Asian countries, who flee from village to village, who hide Bibles in the lining of their coats, who have been imprisoned. Today, I think about the children who live across the street from me, just over the highway, who will go hungry tonight, and I wish I could know their faces.

When we come to the line about peace in our time, I cannot speak. I weep. A few tears stain the prayerbook, I rock back on my knees and feel them recoil at the hardness of the stone floor, and I lift up my eyes to that central image, to our crucified God, and I am overwhelmed by Beauty and Truth and Love.

I think it was Pascal who once said, “Christ will be in agony until the end of the world.”

Join me, for the first time, over at A Deeper Story?

© 2011, Preston. All rights reserved.