Month: September 2008

Doxa

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Well – I’m back from an absolutely fantastic weekend camping with youth, young adults and others. What a great and EXHAUSTING time!!!! I got to watch my six-year-old son do three front flips off of a sand cliff. I watched my eldest son hang with his proto-teenage friends in all their glory and watched as my six-year-old daughter idolized the teen girls all weekend. What fun.
Sunday morning we had a nice little service in the field adjacent to our campsite facing the rising sun and surrounded on all sides by pine, poplar and brich trees. The theme of the service was Doxa which is variously translated as belief or glory. Of course they didn’t explicitly know this. It’s not like I opened the service with the words “today’s theme is DOXA” because I would have lost most of my youth right there.
As belief you see doxa appear in words such as Orthodoxy aka “right or correct belief.” As glory you see doxa appear in words such as doxology aka “words about glory or glory words.” The sense I was speaking of was glory. We faced the warmth of the sun and opened in prayer thanking God for the reminders of His presence in creation and then I read Psalm 19 which does a great job speaking of God’s glory in creation. After that a short intro to the Doxology which we then sang as a closing prayer.
In Roman Catholic circles the Gloria Patri serves as a doxology and it would serve the rest of us just fine as well:
Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in sæcula sæculorum. Amen.
Translated from Latin to English:
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and always, to the ages of ages. Amen.
The following is more commonly used by Protestants and was written by Anglican Priest Thomas Ken in 1674.
The Doxology
==========
Praise God from whom all blessings flow
Praise Him all creatures here below
Praise Him above you heavenly host
Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost
Amen
All in all the weekend was, in a word, “glorious.”

Girls in Their Summer Clothes

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I REALLY like this song by Bruce Springsteen:
 
Well, the streetlights shine down on Blessing Avenue
Lovers they walk by, holding hands two by two
A breeze crosses the porch, bicycle spokes spin ’round
My jackets on, I’m out the door
And tonight I’m gonna burn this town down

The girls in their summer clothes
In the cool of the evening light
The girls in their summer clothes, pass me by

A kids rubber ball smacks
Off the gutter ‘neath the lamp light
Big bank clock chimes
Off go the sleepy front porch lights
Downtown the stores alight as the evening’s underway
Things been a little tight
But I know their gonna turn my way

And the girls in their summer clothes
In the cool of the evening light
The girls in their summer clothes, pass me by

Frankie’s diner, an old friend on the edge of town
The neon sign spinning round
Like a cross over the lost and found
The fluorescent lights flick over Pop’s Grill
Shaniqua brings the coffee and asks "Fill?" and says "Penny for your thoughts now my boy, Bill"

She went away, she cut me like a knife
Hello beautiful thing, maybe you could save my life
In just a glance, down here on magic street
Loves a fool’s dance
And I ain’t got much sense, but I still got my feet

The girls in their summer clothes
In the cool of the evening light
The girls in their summer clothes, pass me by

The girls in their summer clothes
In the cool of the evening light
The girls in their summer clothes, pass me by

Copyright © 2007 Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP)

Camping!

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I am verexcited! I am going camping this weekend with 33 friends (youth and some sponsors). Should be a blast. We’re going to Spruce Woods Provincial Park about two hours from here. We’re taking our old cheese can school bus and setting up dome tent city in the fantastic group campsite we had last year. This will be our third year doing this. Last year we went at the end of September (brr) and the year before that we went at the end of October (BRRRRRRR). We keep sneaking closer to summer.
 
We’ve got some great activities planned but have scheduled loads of free time as well. I can’t stand events that are so full of activities there’s no room to breath so I think we have a great mix this year. It’s a good gender mix too – 14 girls and 19 guys.
 
Even if it rains it’ll be a blast. Pray for us!
 
 

Sarah Palin

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I watched the Republican National Convention speeches this evening, mostly for Sarah Palin. I wasn’t sure what to expect but was pretty impressed by the whole thing. Clearly Palin is no push-over and took some pretty substantive swings at Obama and others. She’s a good speaker. Not as good as Obama but then no one has been that good in a very long time (Kennedy and Reagan come to mind). The thing is – Obama is so polished he comes across as a rhetorician – someone who is trained to win an argument regardless of the side he’s on – all mechanics and crowd manipulation and little actual depth. Very emotive but not consistent.
 
Palin on the other hand came across as simply a forceful, focused and tough individual. Very clear. Very consistent. It’ll be an interesting election down south. We’ve got our own coming up soon here. Short of massive turn-around I think our Prime Minister Stephen Harper is headed for a majority government. And why not? He has governed well. He’s not a shiney personality but a brilliant strategist who has surrounded himself with some smart folks. I think they’re in for the long haul. We’ll see…I highly doubt we’ll ever read the headlines: Prime Minister Dion or Prime Minister Layton.

BetaBoy

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Ok – so right now I am beta testing two different browsers – Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 and Google’s new Chrome. There both VERY good. I am a pretty hardcore Microsoft fan. I have used piles of other software including other operating systems when they used to exist (Mac, OS/2, Linux, Unix) and I keep coming back to Microsoft.

I am actually writing this update in Chrome just to see how stable it is and how it deals with more complex websites. So far so good. It is a very simple browser and incredibly fast compared with IE. I know a lot of people use Firefox but I really don’t like it. I find it renders a lot of pages in a fairly ugly way and you have to constantly download plug-ins etc. I’ve used Safari for Vista and although it looks nice (as you would expect from Apple) it doesn’t really distinguish itself from IE.

Chrome is definitely taking advantage of Google’s search engine ability by offering suggestions as you are typing in the url.

Anyhow – if Chrome somehow convinces me to switch from IE it will be a miracle but – stranger things have happened.

P.S. First strike for Chrome – it’s not picking up my paragraph breaks in Spaces editor. Not a good start.

The Fall of Boromir

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I was wtching The Fellowship of the Ring tonight with the kids and was struck by the fall of Boromir near the end. Boromir in many ways represents the brokeness of humanity. He is the natural result of life without hope. Yet, even within his brokeness there is something greater that strains to overcome his darkness – the spark of his creator, the hope of Illuvator and the Valor in him as he realizes his own weakness and seeks to redeem himself in defending Merry and Pippen.
 
Aragorn, on the other hand represents all the potential that humanity has, even in its brokeness, when it trusts in something greater than itself. Aragorn who is able to resist the temptation of the ring where Boromir has failed. Aragorn who is able to offer forgiveness to Boromir and still weep over his death.
 
Tolkien wove much worth studying into his classic tale. A character study of Aragorn and Boromir are worth pursuing . Part of the greatness of Tolkien is that he is able to bring the reader into Aragorn’s grief at Boromir’s death. We do not feel pleasure or a sense of gratification as though justice is being served. We feel only the cold sadness at watching another person torn down by evil.