18 September 2008
Delicious Stone Fruit
Hanna, Jeff, and I wandered over to Riverview Orchard a week or so ago in the height of the busy times. The Crandall family and the Peck family were exceedingly gracious as always and we certainly got our fill of delicious things, relaxing times, stimulating drink, and good company. Some photos are available at right...
27 August 2008
A great sermon...
"Transfigured Moments"
Check out this 1926 sermon by Vernon Johns, a highly revered black pastor who appears to have had great influence on other famous black pastors (recall MLK's "Mountain Top" sermon). He looks at the mountain-top experience of Jesus and prescribes such experiences to us. He takes his text from Mathew 17.
This is good stuff to consider when ascending the landscape...
"It is good to be the possessor of some mountain-top experience. Not to know life on the heights, is to suffer an impoverishing incompleteness. To be sure, there is better opportunity for practical pursuits in the valley regions, and life is easier and safer there: but views are possible from the mountain top which are not to be had in the vale. A missionary in the Balkans once took a small boy, who lived at the base of a mountain, on a journey up its side. When they gained the summit, the little climber looked this way and that, and then said with astonishment: 'My! What a wonderful world! I never dreamed it was so large.' Horizons broaden when we stand on the heights. There is always the danger that we will make of life too much of a dead-level existence: that we will make of life a slavish following of the water courses; a monotonous tread of beaten paths; a matter of absorbing, spiritless, deadening routine. There is the danger that we will drop our lives into the passing current to be kept steadily going, we hardly know where or why. Crowded in the throngs that traverse the common ways, we proceed through life with much motion and little vision. The late President Wilson, in a wonderful essay, speaks of the man who allows his duties to rise about him like a flood. Such a man goes on through the years 'swimming with sturdy stroke, his eyes level with the surface, never seeing any clouds or any passing ships.' We can pay such regular tribute to Motion that all valid sense of Direction is lost; so that all our hurrying activities may prove but the rush to ruin. In view of this, it is good for us, occasionally at least, to clamber up from the levels of our set habits of thought, our artificial actions and our settled prejudices to some loftier plane, which affords a more commanding view than we have from the crowded thoroughfares, the low familiar ways. From some mountain eminence let us have occasionally a quiet look upon life, to reflect what it means and whither it is carrying us. The luminaries of humanity were familiar with elevated ground. Moses, Elijah, Mohammed and Jesus all had mountain traditions. It is said by a well-known Old Testament interpreter that the religious history of the Hebrew people is inseparable from the topography of their country. The mountains round about Jerusalem are tied up with the vision of God and the vision of life, which Israel gave to mankind.
Who of all the contemporaries of Jesus, busy in market place, fields and thoroughfares, dreamed that the next great strides of history would take their direction from the vision of one who was praying in the midst of three unheralded fishermen, far above sea level and the level of life! So it was. So may it ever be. How many people in high and lofty moments, when they have taken the time and pains to climb above the dingy, foggy levels of incorporated thinking and living, have struck out for themselves and others new and better courses! 'I thought on my ways, and I turned my feet.…' 'I will turn aside and see.…' 'When he came to himself he said…' 'And he taketh them up into an exceeding high mountain.' These passages belong to the experience of epoch makers. On the heights is the location for moral discovery. It is a slower process and requires stouter gear to do the mountain roads than to run along the shining speedways of the valley. But woe to the world when there are no visitors on the heights!"
Check out this 1926 sermon by Vernon Johns, a highly revered black pastor who appears to have had great influence on other famous black pastors (recall MLK's "Mountain Top" sermon). He looks at the mountain-top experience of Jesus and prescribes such experiences to us. He takes his text from Mathew 17.
This is good stuff to consider when ascending the landscape...
"It is good to be the possessor of some mountain-top experience. Not to know life on the heights, is to suffer an impoverishing incompleteness. To be sure, there is better opportunity for practical pursuits in the valley regions, and life is easier and safer there: but views are possible from the mountain top which are not to be had in the vale. A missionary in the Balkans once took a small boy, who lived at the base of a mountain, on a journey up its side. When they gained the summit, the little climber looked this way and that, and then said with astonishment: 'My! What a wonderful world! I never dreamed it was so large.' Horizons broaden when we stand on the heights. There is always the danger that we will make of life too much of a dead-level existence: that we will make of life a slavish following of the water courses; a monotonous tread of beaten paths; a matter of absorbing, spiritless, deadening routine. There is the danger that we will drop our lives into the passing current to be kept steadily going, we hardly know where or why. Crowded in the throngs that traverse the common ways, we proceed through life with much motion and little vision. The late President Wilson, in a wonderful essay, speaks of the man who allows his duties to rise about him like a flood. Such a man goes on through the years 'swimming with sturdy stroke, his eyes level with the surface, never seeing any clouds or any passing ships.' We can pay such regular tribute to Motion that all valid sense of Direction is lost; so that all our hurrying activities may prove but the rush to ruin. In view of this, it is good for us, occasionally at least, to clamber up from the levels of our set habits of thought, our artificial actions and our settled prejudices to some loftier plane, which affords a more commanding view than we have from the crowded thoroughfares, the low familiar ways. From some mountain eminence let us have occasionally a quiet look upon life, to reflect what it means and whither it is carrying us. The luminaries of humanity were familiar with elevated ground. Moses, Elijah, Mohammed and Jesus all had mountain traditions. It is said by a well-known Old Testament interpreter that the religious history of the Hebrew people is inseparable from the topography of their country. The mountains round about Jerusalem are tied up with the vision of God and the vision of life, which Israel gave to mankind.
Who of all the contemporaries of Jesus, busy in market place, fields and thoroughfares, dreamed that the next great strides of history would take their direction from the vision of one who was praying in the midst of three unheralded fishermen, far above sea level and the level of life! So it was. So may it ever be. How many people in high and lofty moments, when they have taken the time and pains to climb above the dingy, foggy levels of incorporated thinking and living, have struck out for themselves and others new and better courses! 'I thought on my ways, and I turned my feet.…' 'I will turn aside and see.…' 'When he came to himself he said…' 'And he taketh them up into an exceeding high mountain.' These passages belong to the experience of epoch makers. On the heights is the location for moral discovery. It is a slower process and requires stouter gear to do the mountain roads than to run along the shining speedways of the valley. But woe to the world when there are no visitors on the heights!"
30 July 2008
Remarks from my Trip
This was a trip of wonderful contrasts. Finland was for me the perfect place to relax. It is a landscape where there are no mountains to climb, one that is devoid of sights "not to be missed" and blanketed by a comfortable quilt of curvaceous lakes, fields of practical grasses, and humble mossy forests. It is a place without extraneous ornament in landscape or culture and this makes it one of the most effective of retreats. It seems to me that even the famous saunas, an element of trendy spas here and across Europe, are not considered luxuries in Finland, but a practical way to remain clean, warm, relaxed and Finnish. I took full advantage of the saunas, trying three different kinks in Finland and another kind in Estonia (The modern electric common in virtually everyone's home or apartment, a wood-fired Sauna at Hanna's grandparents' farm in Huotari, a savu or flueless wood-fired sauna that helped celebrate Hanna's brother and sister-in-law's marriage, and a public sauna in Tallinn, Estonia.) I could not bare to go a day without a good sweat and therefore did not while I was there. My present suffering has produced much scheming as to how I might procure my own sauna...
Another point: Through the connectivity of the internet, I was able to get in contact with Paulina and Pekka, some friends I had met over six years ago when we were all exchange students in Graz, Austria. Because we were driving back through their home town on the way to Helsinki from the countryside, Jeff and Hanna were gracious enough to stop in to make a little visit. What a fantastic thing it is to catch up with friends made so briefly in the grand scheme of things the better part of a decade later! Over coffee at midnight, we unpacked memories and experiences that I had not thought of in years. Very much worth the small effort, and I hope to continue to meet old friends and acquaintances around the world and at home.
My little overnight trip to Tallinn, the capital city of the Baltic state of Estonia, on the ferry reminded me of the more opulent ways of continental Europe. A tourist and shopping center (cheap tax-free Finnish beer!) for the Helsinkites, Tallinn appears to have unabashedly embraced the various ornaments of its various occupiers. It is certainly fair that they now profit from what the empires had built. A quick walk through Tallinn shows that it is a fair walled city that shows its the medieval influence of the Germans. However, dotted throughout are examples of Russian imperial, Soviet Russian, and the more recent and admittedly more democratic western capitalistic influences. (I looked very hard, and I saw maybe two cars that were built in the twentieth century!) This is not to say that one can't find indigenous culture in Tallinn. Indigenous culture just seems, like in nearly all of the E.U., to be indigenous only within the context of all its other cultural influences. Note that this comes from the point view of a tourist there for less than 24 hours who had no real contact with Estonians...
On to New York! Carl and Jenny, more friends from my Austrian experience, were my hosts with a cozy base camp in Astoria in Queens. (The walls of their apartment were studded in many places with great pictures of Graz and Stiermark, which again evoked great memories of six years ago.) New York is vast beyond my previous expectations. Really for the first time since wandering around Freiburg when I was sixteen, did I feel the distinct rush of being overwhelmed in a city.
Carl was an intrepid guide, if oppressed by the heat and humidity. As we toured the different parts of the city, it was very difficult to suppress conjuring up old associations with New York from popular culture and my studies: Little Italy and The Godfather, Greenwich Village and turn-of-the-century American radicals, Brownstones with stoops and Harlem Jazz, distant views of Ellis Island and the end of Fiddler on the Roof, Rockefeller Center and "hi mom"-ing tourists behind the Today Show, the big construction site downtown and the unfortunate defining moment of the present age, and a hundred other things. It is good to begin to soak up a place that is a reference point for so much in American culture.
I hope to upload a smattering of photos that illustrate the contrasts of my trip. There are many actual stories that came from this trip that I have neither the patience or time to elucidate, but hopefully we can catch up over coffee soon and swap stories.
Another point: Through the connectivity of the internet, I was able to get in contact with Paulina and Pekka, some friends I had met over six years ago when we were all exchange students in Graz, Austria. Because we were driving back through their home town on the way to Helsinki from the countryside, Jeff and Hanna were gracious enough to stop in to make a little visit. What a fantastic thing it is to catch up with friends made so briefly in the grand scheme of things the better part of a decade later! Over coffee at midnight, we unpacked memories and experiences that I had not thought of in years. Very much worth the small effort, and I hope to continue to meet old friends and acquaintances around the world and at home.
My little overnight trip to Tallinn, the capital city of the Baltic state of Estonia, on the ferry reminded me of the more opulent ways of continental Europe. A tourist and shopping center (cheap tax-free Finnish beer!) for the Helsinkites, Tallinn appears to have unabashedly embraced the various ornaments of its various occupiers. It is certainly fair that they now profit from what the empires had built. A quick walk through Tallinn shows that it is a fair walled city that shows its the medieval influence of the Germans. However, dotted throughout are examples of Russian imperial, Soviet Russian, and the more recent and admittedly more democratic western capitalistic influences. (I looked very hard, and I saw maybe two cars that were built in the twentieth century!) This is not to say that one can't find indigenous culture in Tallinn. Indigenous culture just seems, like in nearly all of the E.U., to be indigenous only within the context of all its other cultural influences. Note that this comes from the point view of a tourist there for less than 24 hours who had no real contact with Estonians...
On to New York! Carl and Jenny, more friends from my Austrian experience, were my hosts with a cozy base camp in Astoria in Queens. (The walls of their apartment were studded in many places with great pictures of Graz and Stiermark, which again evoked great memories of six years ago.) New York is vast beyond my previous expectations. Really for the first time since wandering around Freiburg when I was sixteen, did I feel the distinct rush of being overwhelmed in a city.
Carl was an intrepid guide, if oppressed by the heat and humidity. As we toured the different parts of the city, it was very difficult to suppress conjuring up old associations with New York from popular culture and my studies: Little Italy and The Godfather, Greenwich Village and turn-of-the-century American radicals, Brownstones with stoops and Harlem Jazz, distant views of Ellis Island and the end of Fiddler on the Roof, Rockefeller Center and "hi mom"-ing tourists behind the Today Show, the big construction site downtown and the unfortunate defining moment of the present age, and a hundred other things. It is good to begin to soak up a place that is a reference point for so much in American culture.
I hope to upload a smattering of photos that illustrate the contrasts of my trip. There are many actual stories that came from this trip that I have neither the patience or time to elucidate, but hopefully we can catch up over coffee soon and swap stories.
07 July 2008
New York, New York
Another song, eh?
I should mention I will also be spending a few days in New York City on the way back...
Finland, Finland, Finland
Comment if you know the song to which the title is referring.
I'm heading to Finland (Helsinki and Iisalmi) tomorrow morning for a few weeks. I'm happy to be out of the highway 2 corridor for a bit, and will hopefully return raring to get back in the woods.
Pictures and further updates will be posted at the habitual snail's pace.
20 May 2008
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