Category: Metaphysical

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Ash Wednesday

The Cinch Review

Today is Ash Wednesday on the calendar of many Christians; perhaps a wise day to put aside the slings, arrows and even entertainments of mundane existence, at least for a moment. And I think certainly part of the value of making the observance is that it’s darned near impossible to be distracted by petty things during the moment that the minister or priest makes the sign of the cross in ashes on one’s forehead, and says the words that brook no debate: Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

In my own little church in the wildwood, congregants were encouraged to read Psalm 90 to themselves in their pews while waiting for the line of ash-recipients to dwindle. (It’s a notable fact that quite a few people come to receive ashes who are not otherwise regular attendees at the church. I guess whenever you’re giving away something free …) Continue reading “Ash Wednesday”

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Masked and Anonymous

The following is a passage from Abraham Joshua Heschel’s deeply inspiring book, Man Is Not Alone.

God is unwilling to be alone, and man cannot forever remain impervious to what He longs to show. Those of us who cannot keep their striving back find themselves at times within the sight of the unseen and become aglow with its rays. Some of us blush, others wear a mask. Faith is a blush in the presence of God.

Some of us blush, others wear a mask which veils spontaneous sensitivity to the holy ineffable dimension of reality. We all wear so much mental make-up, we have almost forfeited our face. But faith only comes when we stand face to face — the ineffable in us with the ineffable beyond us — suffer ourselves to be seen, to commune, to receive a ray and to reflect it. But to do that the soul must be alive within the mind.

Responsiveness to God cannot be copied; it must be original with every soul. Even the meaning of the divine is not grasped when imposed by a doctrine, when accepted by hearsay. It only enters our vision when leaping like a spark from the anvil of the mind, hammered and beaten upon by trembling awe.

I noted that particular passage for its (pre-)echo of Bob Dylan’s concept of humans as beings who go around wearing masks, as in his 2004 film. However, it is galvanizing and soaring writing irrespective of any Dylan echoes. And that applies to every page of the book. Quite amazing.

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Bono Talks Jesus Christ

The Cinch Review

Via BabyBlueOnline, this is an extract from the book Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayasin which Bono of U2 is responding to questions about his faith:

Assayas: That’s a great idea, no denying it. Such great hope is wonderful, even though it’s close to lunacy, in my view. Christ has his rank among the world’s great thinkers. But Son of God, isn’t that farfetched?

Bono: No, it’s not farfetched to me. Look, the secular response to the Christ story always goes like this: he was a great prophet, obviously a very interesting guy, had a lot to say along the lines of other great prophets, be they Elijah, Muhammad, Buddha, or Confucius. But actually Christ doesn’t allow you that. He doesn’t let you off that hook. Christ says: No. I’m not saying I’m a teacher, don’t call me teacher. I’m not saying I’m a prophet. I’m saying: “I’m the Messiah.” I’m saying: “I am God incarnate.” And people say: No, no, please, just be a prophet. A prophet, we can take. You’re a bit eccentric. We’ve had John the Baptist eating locusts and wild honey, we can handle that. But don’t mention the “M” word! Because, you know, we’re gonna have to crucify you. And he goes: No, no. I know you’re expecting me to come back with an army, and set you free from these creeps, but actually I am the Messiah. At this point, everyone starts staring at their shoes, and says: Oh, my God, he’s gonna keep saying this. So what you’re left with is: either Christ was who He said He was the Messiah or a complete nutcase. I mean, we’re talking nutcase on the level of Charles Manson. This man was like some of the people we’ve been talking about earlier. This man was strapping himself to a bomb, and had “King of the Jews” on his head, and, as they were putting him up on the Cross, was going: OK, martyrdom, here we go. Bring on the pain! I can take it. I’m not joking here. The idea that the entire course of civilization for over half of the globe could have its fate changed and turned upside-down by a nutcase, for me, that’s farfetched.

The same has been said in countless different ways (often times highfalutin) before, and but Bono’s blunt and pithy way of handling the question cuts right to the heart in admirable and refreshing fashion. Good on ya, Mister Vox.


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Angry at God? Get in line (with atheists)

The Cinch Review

A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is said to show that virtually everyone feels anger towards God at various points in their lives, especially after the loss through death of a loved one, or a diagnosis with a serious illness. The interesting thing is that this includes self-professed unbelievers in God. In fact, according to this study, they get angrier Continue reading “Angry at God? Get in line (with atheists)”

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Christopher Hitchens on Ricks, Bob Dylan and Bach


In a previous post I mentioned the writer Christopher Hitchens, who is suffering from some serious cancer, and posted a clip of an interview with him which was bookended by Bob Dylan’s song “Gates of Eden.” Thanks to Sue who responded with a note titled “The Two Christophers”:

Just recently finished Christopher Ricks’ “Dylan’s Visions of Sin” – on your recommendation. A very interesting book and, thankfully, very easy to read. I fairly raced through it. Two things i particularly liked about Ricks was firstly his unwillingness to belittle Dylan’s faith – and at the same time speak quite rightly about the hypocrisy of those who did; and his digs at the “works” of Michael Gray and his ilk. Fascinating stuff.

On the subject of Christopher Hitchens…. I too like him a lot, but tend to agree with him on a lot of things. It was a shock to see him in that clip. I hadn’t heard of his illness and the last time I saw him was looking his usual self on The Daily Show. It so happens I’m reading “Hitch-22” at the moment – and also racing through it – and found a quote regarding Christopher Ricks that may interest you.

Hitchens speaks about how, at a meeting of his school Poetry Society, he was first urged to listen to this Bob “Dillon” person and soon became hooked:

“…I’ve since had all kinds of differences with Professor Christopher Ricks, but he is and always has been correct in maintaining that Dylan is one of the essential poets of our time, and it felt right to meet him in the company of Shelley and Milton and Lowell and not in one of the record shops that were then beginning to sprout alongside the town coffee bars.”

Perhaps that explains for you the choice of music for the clip…

It’s interesting that Hitchens makes that tribute to Christopher Ricks. Professor Ricks’ book, Dylan’s Visions of Sin, got generally favorable reviews as I recall, along with some bemused ones, but Hitchens himself actually gave it a pretty brutal treatment in the Weekly Standard. I looked that review up to refresh my memory as to what bones he had to pick with it. Perusing it again, I personally think his chief problem with the book came down to not being able to take Ricks’ playful and in a way quite guileless sense of humor.

Be that as it may, in looking up that article I also came across a so-called “Proust Questionnaire” that Hitchens answered in the pages of Vanity Fair, just a few months ago (but before his cancer diagnosis — which inevitably imparts a degree of irony to some of the answers). To the question of who is his favorite musician, Hitchens answers: “J. S. Bach, Bob Dylan.” Solid choices, albeit that he’s cheating by choosing two, but I think that’s entirely appropriate in order to cover both classical and popular music.

However, his choices also raise a question, which has surely been raised before regarding these recent highly-vocal advocates for atheism (the most high-profile being Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins). The question is this: How many of them would really like to live in a world where everyone agreed with them that there was no God (or that if there was a God that he must be either evil or entirely unknowable)? It’s hard to figure what kind of music J.S. Bach and Bob Dylan would have made had they been without any belief in God (and not just in any god, but the particular God of the Bible). I have to honestly doubt that in such a scenario Johann’s and Bob’s music would have achieved that transcendent quality necessary to have earned them this selection by Christopher Hitchens as his favorite musicians on his Vanity Fair questionnaire.



Of-course many atheists or agnostics are smart enough to acknowledge this; i.e. that while they themselves may not find any reason for faith, they are grateful that many others can, not only for the value that faith has brought to things artistic, but for what it has meant for the ordering of human society, and in particular what the Judeo-Christian bedrock has meant to Western societies.

This is as opposed to those now ubiquitous voices who blame “religion” for “causing all the wars,” blindly ignoring what are by far the bloodiest death tolls of all history, which are those that came as a result of the anti-God ideologies of Communism and Nazism.

Related articles across the web

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Universe to End as “Cold, Dead Wasteland”

The Cinch Review

Earth (for now)That’s it. The end. For real and forever. Now that you know, how does it make you feel, exactly? As published in the journal Science, and summarized below by the BBC:

Astronomers used the way that light from distant stars was distorted by a huge galactic cluster known as Abell 1689 to work out the amount of dark energy in the cosmos.

Dark energy is a mysterious force that speeds up the expansion of the universe.

Understanding the distribution of this force revealed that the likely fate of the universe was to keep on expanding.

[…]

Eventually it will become a cold, dead wasteland with a temperature approaching what scientists term “absolute zero”.

Professor Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University, a leading cosmologist and co-author of this study, said that the findings finally proved “exactly what the fate of the universe will be”.

Hmmm. And how does Professor Natarajan feel about that, I wonder? She seems happy enough to be the messenger, and I suppose it is quite the feather in her cap.

You would think that this news about the ultimate fate of the universe and everything that it has ever contained — including all of our lives, legacies and dreams — would be getting more attention, and indeed perhaps it will once it filters out through the rest of what’s going on in the headlines today, like the baseball player Roger Clemens being indicted for perjury and the salmonella-induced recall of 340 million eggs in the United States. Continue reading “Universe to End as “Cold, Dead Wasteland””

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Hitchens at the Gate

The Cinch Review

Jeffery Goldberg of The Atlantic conducted an interview with Christopher Hitchens — the well known writer who is suffering from some very serious cancer — and some of it is posted at this link, and embedded here below. This part of their discussion, which also has some contributions from the writer Martin Amis, deals with the cancer itself as well has the notion of deathbed conversion and belief in God generally. It’s interesting, and it also happens to be book-ended by audio clips of Bob Dylan singing “Gates Of Eden.”

Though I disagree with him on many if not most things these days, I like Christopher Hitchens as a writer and personality quite a lot — and who doesn’t? (Alright, Dr. Kissinger: please don’t bother writing in.) Continue reading “Hitchens at the Gate”

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The Lord’s Prayer

The Cinch Review

Those attending Christian churches this morning following the most common Lectionaries would, I think, have heard from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 11 (KJV):

And it came to pass, that, as he was praying in a certain place, when he ceased, one of his disciples said unto him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples.

And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth.

Give us day by day our daily bread.

And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.

Continue reading “The Lord’s Prayer”

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Tom Jones’s Gospel Music Not Liked By Some

The Cinch Review

Tom Jones - Praise & Blame

Tom Jones’ new album is called Praise & Blame,and has a distinct tilt towards songs of faith, like What Good Am I?, Didn’t It Rain, and Lord Help the Poor and Needy. Now, an e-mail from the vice-president of Island Records, David Sharpe, has been leaked by someone, and it indicates some extreme displeasure with the Tom’s latest musical direction. From WalesOnline:

Mr Sharpe fumed to colleagues: “I have just listened to the album and want to know if this is some sick joke?”

[…] [The e-mail] stated: “We did not invest a fortune in an established artist for him to deliver 12 tracks from the common book of prayer.

“This is certainly not what we paid for.”

Jones is not happy about this and is making his feelings clear.

“In the press it says that I’ve gone off and made something that the record company didn’t pay me for and that they don’t like it.

“People tell me that all publicity is good publicity, that’s what I’ve been told.

“People say to me ‘well it’s being talked about’, but to me it’s being talked about in a negative way.

“Hopefully, if there’s any good that comes out of it, it’s that people will wonder about [the new album]. But it isn’t the way I would handle it by going and making a stupid statement. That’s not going to help it.

“They’ve apologised, they can’t apologise enough – and they’ve said ‘we’ll make good on this’.”

Some people, perhaps including Tom Jones, are not entirely sure if this e-mail reflected Sharpe’s real opinions or if the leaking of it is in fact a kind of publicity stunt. However, I think we may mislead ourselves by assuming too much deviousness, when in fact Sharpe’s scathing response to Tom Jones’ gospel music is pretty much par for the course amongst record executives when one of their secular artists makes this kind of move.

It’s well established history how the execs at Columbia hated Bob Dylan’s gospel stuff, and went out of their way to bury Saved.(Some conspiracy theorists even suspect they sabotaged the mix on that record.) I’ve written in a different venue on how Paddy McAloon’s masterpiece Let’s Change the World With Musicwas dismissed, if not suppressed, by those in control of the purse strings at Sony in the U.K. back in 1992, reportedly because of discomfort with numerous references to the divine in the songs’ lyrics.

The only thing I wonder is this: In these cases, do the record company executives oppose songs of faith because they genuinely believe that kind of music won’t sell (in which case I think they’re grossly mistaken) or does the attitude come from a deep antipathy towards the very concept of belief in God?

Motivations tend to be messy, so what’s going on is probably a combination of the two, but I would not at all underestimate the latter cause.

I do note that it’s quite sad that any Englishman would refer to the venerable old Book of Common Prayer as the “common book of prayer.”

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Region N11 of Large Magellanic Cloud (and Psalm 8)

The Cinch Review

Large Magellanic Cloud Psalm 8

Pictured here is just another breathtaking image from the Hubble Space Telescope, recently released. It is of a region called N11 of the Large Magellanic Cloud. The sciences of physics and astronomy tell us that what we’re looking at is a nursery of stars. (More images and more details are at this link.) Gases are being compressed and compacted here and nuclear fusion is sparking and bringing forth bright new spheres of light and energy which will shine for billions of years, like our own Sun. What planets might they light, what frozen or perhaps boiling vistas on strange and beautiful worlds that human eyes will never see?

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers
the moon and stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?

When I was younger, there was a very difficult-to-resolve conflict here. Continue reading “Region N11 of Large Magellanic Cloud (and Psalm 8)”

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Miles Davis on friendship

The Cinch Review

The following is a passage from Miles: The Autobiography.

Shooting heroin changed my whole personality from being a nice, quiet, honest, caring person into someone who was the complete opposite. It was the drive to get the heroin that made me that way. I’d do anything not to get sick, which meant getting and shooting heroin all the time, all day and all night.

I started to get money from whores to feed and support my habit. I started to pimp them, even before I realized that this was what I was doing. I was what I used to call a “professional junkie.” That’s all I lived for. I even chose my jobs according to whether it would be easy for me to cop drugs. I turned into one of the best hustlers because I had to get heroin every day, no matter what I had to do.

I even beat Clark Terry out of some money once in order to buy some drugs. I was down around the Hotel America, where Clark lived, too, sitting on the curb thinking about how and where I was going to get some money to get off when Clark walked up. My nose was runny and my eyes were all red. He bought me some breakfast and afterward he took me to his room at the hotel and told me to get some sleep. He was going out on the road with Count Basie and about to leave. He told me when I felt well enough to leave to just lock the door behind me, but I could stay as long as I wanted to. That’s how tight we were. He knew what I was doing but he just figured I would never do nothing fucked up to him, right? Wrong.

As soon as Clark left to catch his bus, I opened up his drawers and closets and took everything I could get my hands on to carry. Took a horn and a lot of clothes straight to the pawnshop and what I couldn’t pawn, I sold for whatever little money I could get for the stuff. I even sold Philly Jones a shirt that Clark later saw him in. Later I found out that Clark didn’t catch the bus. He had waited but the bus had taken longer than he thought. He came back to his hotel room to check on how I was doing and found his door wide open. Clark called home to St. Louis and told his wife, Pauline, who was still living there, to call my father and tell him what bad shape I was in. When she called him, my father got on his case.

“The only thing that’s wrong with Miles now is those damn musicians like your husband that he’s hanging around with,” he said to her. My father believed in me and it was hard for him to accept that I was in real deep trouble, and so he blamed Clark. My father felt that Clark had been the reason that I had gone into music in the first place.

Since Clark knew my father, he knew where he was coming from, and on top of everything, Clark forgave me for what I had done to him. But for a little while after that, I avoided being anyplace I thought Clark was going to be. When we did finally run into each other, I apologized and we went on like nothing had ever happened. Now, that’s a good friend. A long time after that every time he caught me in a bar drinking with my change on the counter, he’d take it for payment on what I had stolen. Man, that was some funny shit.

It sure was. We can probably all find something to relate to in Miles’ story above. Like for me: the terrible ease with which one can find oneself slipping into pimpery, almost so subtly as to not even realize it.

In any case, what a friend Miles Davis had in Clark Terry. Clark takes Miles in even though he knows that Miles is a heroin junkie. He disregards the risk and leaves his place at the mercy of Miles. When Davis rips off everything he can carry, Terry’s first thought is to get word to Davis’s father that Miles is in really bad shape. Yet, Terry understands when the senior Mr. Davis instead blames him for whatever is wrong with Miles. Further, he forgives Miles for the abuse of their friendship and even turns the whole episode into a joke between them.

Clark was being a spectacularly good friend, pretty obviously. But someone else is being a good friend here too, and that’s Miles Davis. That’s because all of these kindnesses that Clark Terry performed are being remembered and lifted up in a highly sensitive fashion here by Miles Davis himself, on the occasion of the writing of his autobiography.

So, not a lot of point to all this, except to observe that, well, people are just nice sometimes.

…

Miles Davis, one of the greatest figures in jazz, died in 1991 at the age of 65. Clark Terry, a big influence on Miles as a trumpeter and a huge figure in jazz in his own right, is still living today, at the age of 89. (Click here to see a YouTube clip of Terry receiving a Lifetime Achievement Grammy earlier this year.)

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Memorial Mass for Richard John Neuhaus

The Cinch Review

Richard John NeuhausThis past Friday night I attended a memorial mass for Richard John Neuhaus at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, marking the one year anniversary of his passing. I’ve written before about the impact RJN had on me, primarily through his writings; in particular through his profound and classic book Death on a Friday Afternoon. Friday evening’s mass was beautifully done in every respect (including the music provided by the choir of New York’s Church of Notre Dame). The homily was given by Fr. George Rutler. And near the end of the mass, Fr. Benedict Groeschel shared some warm, humorous and poignant stories of Fr. Neuhaus. Continue reading “Memorial Mass for Richard John Neuhaus”

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Earth: The Story So Far

There’s a book called “God With Us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Christmas”.One of the chapters in it was written by the late, great Richard John Neuhaus, and begins like this:

We are all searching, and ultimately — whether we know it or not — we are searching for God. Ultimately, we are searching for the Ultimate, and the Ultimate is God. It is not easy, searching for God, but maybe your reading this book is part of your own searching. The fact is that we do not really know what we’re looking for or who we’re looking for. Almost a thousand years ago, St. Anselm of Canterbury said, “God is that greater than which cannot be thought.” Continue reading “Earth: The Story So Far”

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Rabbi Leon Klenicki

Rabbi Leon Klenicki died this past January 25th, and may he rest in peace. By all accounts he was a giant for the last several decades in the field of Jewish/Christian dialogue.

In 1989, a book was published called “Believing Today: Jew & Christian in Conversation.” It was in effect a conversation between Rabbi Klenicki and Richard John Neuhaus (then a Lutheran pastor). I’ve found this little book to be endlessly fascinating, and I get some fresh illumination every time I pick it up again. Neither Klenicki nor Neuhaus are pretending to represent every practitioner of their respective faiths; it is just what it is: a conversation between two intelligent and knowledgeable believers who value being faithful to their respective traditions. There is no subject from which the two men shy away, be it the history of Christian anti-Semitism, the holocaust, the Messiah, the secularizing impulses of American Jewry, etc, etc. The book is not about holding hands and pretending that everyone believes the same things, but rather about understanding differences, and probing for genuine and firmly-based common ground. Which seem like good goals for Jewish/Christian relations in general. Continue reading “Rabbi Leon Klenicki”

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The Parable of the Bad-Ass Good Samaritans

The Cinch Review

parable of the bad-ass good SamaritansOh, Jesus: if only You could sue. From the Associated Press: NYC cabbie mistakenly beaten by good Samaritans.

Police said a cab driver who tried to take a purse from a woman fare beater was beaten by a group of good Samaritans who thought they were seeing a robbery. Police said it happened Saturday morning near the Staten Island Ferry Terminal when four woman[sic], who had been club-going, got into a fight with the cab driver over the fare. Continue reading “The Parable of the Bad-Ass Good Samaritans”

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A few more links on RJN

The Cinch Review

Just some more things out there pertaining to the late Richard John Neuhaus that I’ve found rewarding:

In NRO, from Rabbi David Novak, this heartfelt piece: RJN and the Jews.

At the First Things blog, reflections from Stefan McDaniel: “Some giants labored in that cloud …”

From the Times of London, click here for a strong-minded obituary, from a more historical perspective, for RJN from an anonymous but seemingly well-informed author.

And this online archive of homilies by Richard John Neuhaus which he gave during masses he said at Columbia University during some spring semesters. Sound quality is mixed but there you go.

And the text of RJN’s resounding speech in July last to the convention of the National Right To Life Committee: We Shall Not Weary, We Shall Not Rest.

More links and info at First Things.