Meanderings, 18 May 2024

Good morning from a summery day in Chicagoland!

Photo by Karo K. on Unsplash

Christopher Bess, the youngest coach ever — for a good start to your morning:

Christopher Bess — known to his fans as Coach CB — is a slam-dunk to make it in the NBA Hall of Fame. It’ll just be a few decades.

At 5-years-old, Christopher, the son of Tarboro High School basketball coach Reggie Bess, has taken the internet by storm. In viral videos, the North Carolina preschooler paces the sidelines, sits courtside with his arms folded, and takes a knee when concentrating on a play. They’re all moves he picked up from shadowing his Dad.

Christopher has his own coaching board on which he draws up X’s and O’s, and he also delivers pre-game locker room pep talks. Sample line: “When I coach my whole butt off, ya’ll play ya’ll whole butt off.” 

When people ask Christopher if he wants to be a coach when he grows up, he responds, “I already am.”

“He’s obsessed with basketball,” Christopher’s mom Natalie Bess tells TODAY.com. “During the NBA playoffs we’ve been letting him stay up late because he gets so upset when we don’t. He changes into khaki pants and a white shirt with a collar and puts a chair right in front of the TV.”

Natalie can’t get over how similar Christopher’s mannerisms are to her husbands. 

Speaking of youth … did you see this one?

CHICAGO (AP) — Dorothy Jean Tillman II’s participation in Arizona State University’s May 6 commencement was the latest step on a higher-education journey the Chicago teen started when she took her first college course at age 10.

In between came associate’s, bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

When Tillman successfully defended her dissertation in December, she became the youngest person — at age 17 — to earn a doctoral degree in integrated behavioral health at Arizona State, associate professor Leslie Manson told ABC’s “Good Morning America” for a story Monday.

“It’s a wonderful celebration, and we hope … that Dorothy Jean inspires more students,” Manson said. “But this is still something so rare and unique.”

Tillman, called “Dorothy Jeanius” by family and friends, is the granddaughter of former Chicago Alderwoman Dorothy Tillman.

The Red Horse:

If the White Horse in verse two is a conqueror seeking power and control, then the red horse reveals the method by which the white horse conquers: warfare.¹ The Lamb conquers by the cross, which releases the power of God to bring resurrection. But the Beast conquers by the sword.

One of the signs of Babylon, according to McKnight and Matchett, is militarism.² These "signs of Babylon" work in the same way that cancer symptoms reveal that something is going terribly wrong deep beneath the surface. The seven churches were meant to be a light in the midst of a dark empire, but it seems that rather than changing Rome, Rome was beginning to change the church. The “signs of Babylon” are the things Christians should watch for, both in their own lives and in their church communities. Those signs reveal that the long tentacles of Babylon are reaching into the church and turning them away from the Lamb and towards the Beast. …

The kingdom of God has a plan for our weapons of war, to repurpose them from tools of death into tools of provision. The Prophet Isaiah calls to us as we gather around the red horse, he offers a new vision for Gods people:

Isaiah 2:4-5
"They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. Come, descendants of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the Lord."

One church father, Justin Martyr, wrote his First Apology to try and ease the fear of the emperor (Antoninus Pius) who feared that Christians, because we serve a different king, were a threat to the empire and were likely to rise up against Rome. But Justin quotes the Prophet Isaiah’s words (above) to calm his fears that Christians intend to stave any fears of a violent Christian uprising. He says:

“We who hated and slew one another… now, after the appearance of Christ, have become sociable, and pray for our enemies, and try to persuade those who hate unjustly, in order that they, living according to the good suggestions of Christ, may share our hope of obtaining the same from the God who is Master of all.”

~Justin, Apologia I, XIV. 3

Aimee Byrd’s right:

Eugene Peterson said something challenging our notion of how we even use the language “spiritual life.” His 83-year-old wisdom cautions us, saying this can be a cheap way to talk. In putting this name, “spiritual,” on a life, you are separating it from the rest of you and the world. Peterson tells us that the whole world is spiritual. He reminds us that the word “Spirit” is wind, breath. “People are all breathing all over the place, we are all spiritual beings.”

We compartmentalize it with the name. And then it is useless, because the spirit is not separate from the body. We need an integrated awareness, an attunement to our inner life and how it is driving the car of our behavior and relationships. Of our knowing God and participation in his kingdom. And we need an awareness of the stories that we are telling ourselves, and how that even affects how we read God’s word and often don’t recognize Christ in it.

It's so paradoxical because the spiritual life is an attunement to God and the soul, and yet it is also so very material. The spiritual life grows in the soil of our stories, our relationships, our lives. If we keep looking up to the heavens, we aren’t going to find it. But we still encounter Jesus all over the place. Not where we expect him, and not how we usually even want to. We dull and ignore his Spirit that is beckoning us.

There’s certainly practices that help us. Many in the church, and as a church. We are to practice opening the door of the kingdom of God together. We serve and receive the sacraments together. We read his word as a community, our different eyes and ears helping us to find him better. And we are in awe in the surprises we find. But he’s also in our faces. The face of your neighbor. And the faces of those we avoid. Or don’t like (Matt. 7:21-23).

We can exercise our spirituality in mindfulness, prayer, journaling, confessional groups, and spending time in nature. Laughing and crying are good ones. And a face that offers a benediction. There are many ways to exercise our spirituality. But Peterson is onto something about the spiritual life, as we like to talk about it. It’s not some side-life.  And it’s not immaterial.  

Well said, Ian, succinct, in true Anglican fashion:

When I became an Anglican (from a background of a different church tradition), I was at first quite puzzled by the choice of Scripture passages that Anglican (that is, Church of England) services kept coming back to—the Benedictus (Luke 1.68–79) in Morning Prayer, the Magnificat (Luke 1.46–55) in Evening Prayer, and the Nunc Dimittis (Luke 2.29–32) at night. For one thing, all these come from one gospel and one section of that gospel. For another, if you were going to repeat a small number of passages again and again, are there not other passages you would choose first? How about the hymn to love in 1 Cor 13? Or the summary of the gospel in 1 Cor 15? Or the ‘Christ hymn’ of Paul in Phil 2? Or John’s magisterial prologue in John 1? (Of course, most of these do find their way into Anglican liturgy in the form of credal affirmations or canticles.)

It took some time for me to realise the importance of the passages from Luke as programmatic summaries of what God was doing in Jesus: fulfilling the hopes of his people Israel in bringing forgiveness, true liberation and peace (the Benedictus); enacting the Great Reversal of God’s grace over against human pride, following the pattern of Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel (the Magnificat); and bringing to completion God’s plan not just for Israel but for the whole world, in anticipation of Jesus’ followers being his witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth (the Nunc Dimittis).

Direct contact, with Ted Gioia:

That’s why artists and other creatives have a realistic advantage versus the power brokers and gatekeepers. In fact, their advantage is growing over time, not shrinking.

But the way to do this is to think small.

That’s why the single most important move I made as a writer happened in July 2007 when I decided—for the first time in my career—that I would self-publish an article on the Internet instead of submitting it to an editor.

At this point I had already published articles in famous periodicals and released books with prestigious imprints. But even though I had the benefit of an impressive track record, I didn’t trust the system. I felt that it was slow and sluggish, and sometimes even hostile.

So I went off on my own.

I eventually launched six of my own websites, just so I could have a place to publish my writings. I put out more than 400 essays on these homemade platforms over the next decade. (Those essays are now in The Vault on my Substack, available to premium subscribers.)  

By any measure, this was career suicide.

Nobody paid me for any of these articles. My homemade websites had no prestige or subscribers or sweet search engine placement. I had no sponsors. I had no marketing budget and no advertising.

I didn’t even have a Twitter account to promote these articles until 2009, and my presence on social media grew very slowly. At the start of 2011, I still had fewer than 70 Twitter followers.

Why was I doing this? Despite the overwhelming odds against me, I felt I was making the right choice.

I had four reasons for bypassing the system 15 years ago:

1. I had more confidence in myself, and the courage of my convictions, than I did in the system;

2. I wanted freedom to write in my own way about the subjects that mattered to me—and the system would fight me at every step unless I took matters into my own hands;

3. I knew I could operate much faster and more fearlessly if I were my own boss; and

4. I wanted to have direct contact with my reader, with nobody standing between us.