Received a few pictures from friends in Sunday school class today. They were able to enjoy their grandbaby amidst some beautiful scenery in our neck of the woods. Psalm 104 comes to mind.

Reading Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding currently. Less than 100 pages in so far. Slow in its plot development but precise in its attention to detail, especially concerning clothes, fashion, stitching, the kinds of fabric, etc. that women wore in the post-Civil War South. This is noteworthy not because these observations are irrelevant. Just the opposite: Welty’s eye is exceptional. She observes how people use their fashion to project, to subdue, to make certain statements about themselves, about how they view themselves, and about how they long to be viewed by others. Welty’s eye for the detail and her ear for the rhythm of southern speech are remarkable. When you hear her read her own stories, it’ll transport you. No kidding. A magnificent eye, ear, and sense of voice and beauty of the spoken tongue. (I have spent much of my life in towns not unlike Jackson, so I may be biased in this regard.) 

     Laura, the nine-year-old girl/protagonist,  is the character from whose vantage point we view the unfolding story. Like its title suggests, the story is so far consumed with the upcoming wedding at the plantation home of the MS family in the Delta. Welty’s precise eye for naming trees, flowers, insects, types of southern cuisine, etc. is unbeatable. When she writes of the smell of magnolias or the swoosh of an oak door opening into a foyer with collards and buttered corn on the table, it’s as visceral as Dickens’ portrayals of Christmas time in Victorian England in A Christmas Carol. 

     Aunts and uncles and cousins, etc. converge upon the plantation to plan. They exude southern expressions, colloquialisms, mannerisms, etc. This is where Welty shines. She demonstrates an expert ear for spoken language. And her writing reflects the cadences and rhythms and soft vowels and slow pace of the MS Delta and the South generally. 

     Here’s what I like about the novel so far. It is accurate in its portrayal of southern belles and those who long to become southern belles. It is precise in its portrayals of southern speech patterns. It reflects, again with precision, the general tendency of southern families to adopt an, “It’s always been this way, so play your part, and keep the tradition going” mindset; the gatherings around the big table in the main home; the way women (young and old) appear consumed with marriage and their future livelihood provided by their husbands; the way the conversations are almost exclusively laden with rumor, tradition, innuendo, prejudice, etc. and a tendency to always view “outsiders” as less than and themselves as the noble and upright exemplars of virtue and civic honor. Welty is not a showy writer.

She’s an observer of human behavior and she lets her stories show what consumes her. She reveals characters who, though they often play the parts assigned to them, often internally kick against the goads, and it is in that kicking that we readers see what actually connects us.

The link’s below.

Thanks for tuning in.

Tolle Lege.

I don’t think I’ve read any Christian theologian as much as I’ve read Jonathan Edwards. I knew I had come upon a theologian for my life when I read how Edwards described a spider’s web that captivated him. He observed the intricacies, the design, the way the spider “launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself . . . ” as Walt Whitman would describe in his poem, “A Noiseless Patient Spider.” What the poet Whitman observed in his lifetime a century after Edwards’ life, Edwards observed a century earlier, but through a vastly different theological lens. Edwards, unlike Whitman, understood that God was and is the Prince/Author of life, to use Peter’s phrase (Acts 3:14-15).

The NASB translates it this way:

But you disowned the Holy and Righteous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, but put to death the Prince of life, whom God raised from the dead, a fact to which we are witnesses. (Acts 3:14-15, NASB)

The ESV translates the same passage this way:

But you denied the Holy and Righteous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses. (Acts 3:14-15, ESV)

What the apostle Peter was doing in the above passage was rebuking his hearers, what he calls the “men of Israel” (Acts 3:12), for their rejection of the truth, for their crucifying the truth, for their sin. Jesus, the God-man, had come, and yet they (and the world generally) rejected Him. They didn’t want the truth. They hated the truth.

But when I read this bio of Jonathan Edwards (my thanks to my friend, Justin, for sending it to me), I was reminded–once again–that Edwards did what Whitman apparently never did. Edwards truly believed the gospel. He understood God’s glory and he was ravished by it.

He understood it from the ways in which a spider spins webs of intricacy. He understood it from the ways sunglight dances on leaves in dappled wonder. He understood it in the ways the Holy Spirit convicts sinners of our sin and brings us back to God’s redeeming good news, the gospel.

Edwards was consumed by the glory, the wisdom, the mercy of the God of the Bible, the only God who is.

If the spider is as instructive through its crafting of intricate webs, how much greater is the God who created corral, zebras, giraffes, fawns, whales, stars, babies, sunsets, grapes, the Swiss Alps, and the colors of Hawaii?

When I was a college kid and graduate student studying literature, I was invariably moved when I read and wrote about Whitman’s poem below:

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Why so moved? Because the speaker sees the intricacies but rejects their Maker, and the speaker’s soul is left detached, disconnected, unrooted. Unlike the spider’s filament which does what it’s supposed to do in accordance with its design, Whitman’s speaker refuses and is left detached. And the poem is therefore a lamentation.

How different from Edwards’ theology.

For Edwards, he discovered that beauty exists because of the One who is beauty Himself. Truth exists because of the One who is truth Himself.

And that makes all the difference.

Nothing bears witness to God the Creator quite like His feathered creatures.

Here are 7 pictures of said creatures.

*Thanks to my friend Jim for sending these my way.

Enjoy.

Was able to come home this weekend and see the family.

Able to sit on the back porch and read, write, and study, too. Was able to hang out with my beloved dogs and hike some.

Saw scores of deer and squirrels.

The leaves of the hardwoods blazed colors.

*My thanks to my friend Justin for his gift of the Edwards bio. It was a great read of my favorite theologian, a man who used his time well.

Some folks can sit in the office and study. As for me, if possible, this is preferable.

My old buddy Brewster, always vigilant.

Looking shaggy after playtime, Lady is thinking only of one thing: food.

My thanks to my friend Justin for the Edwards bio. ‘Twas a great read of my favorite theologian. I’ll upload a YouTube video on Pirtle’s Pages, Episode 5, on this book, later today or tomorrow.

If you enjoy satire by a short story master, join me as we look into Eudora Welty’s gem, “Why I Live at the Post Office.”

Thanks for tuning in and subscribing. I appreciate it.

Tolle Lege.

Stillness speaks.

Visual sermon.

Gray squirrel on the cross ties.

Sunlight dancing on leaves.

A few years ago I was reading a survey of influential writers through church history, and the writer commented that some books are worth a profound sentence or two. I tend to agree. The counter-argument is easily anticipated. “Why read an entire book just for a profound sentence or two?” Well, wisdom is often conveyed via the proverb, the maxim, the aphorism. I read more than anyone I know and even the best of books have some slow parts (Shakespeare’s tragedies, I would argue, are obvious exceptions to the generalization).

This week I read another of Dennis Prager’s books: Happiness Is a Serious Problem. I devoured the book. Prager is a conservative thinker, theologian, radio host, and writer. His book, Still the Best Hope, is a gem I wish everyone would read.

But when I read Happiness Is a Serious Problem, this was the part worth the price of the whole book:

This is where the modern secular world often undermines people’s happiness. A purely secular understanding of existence can only mean that the world ultimately has neither purpose nor meaning. This is not the place to argue which view of the universe–the religious understanding of a purposeful universe or the secular understanding of a random one–is more accurate. There is, after all, no way to know. What is knowable is the consequences of the two views.

If there is no God, no Higher Being, no ultimate guiding hand that imbues creation with meaning and purpose, then creation does not have those qualities. As much as we may find our work, family, friends, and social causes a source of meaning, a secular universe means that there is no ultimate meaning to any of these things. We have made up all these meanings in order not to despair. It is quite difficult to be happy if we stare into the mirror each morning and see only the random product of meaningless forces, stellar dust that happens to be self-aware (105).

The rest of the book is worth the time and investment, but those two paragraphs approach the heart of the issue.

As I try to minister to a generation who has largely bought the secular lie that they are just cosmic dust but should, for some purely subjective non-anchorable reason, feel their lives have significance, this binary seems so obvious.

Definitely worth the read in my view. Tolle Lege.

‘Twas a few decades ago when I met my bride-to-be. There were several things about her that struck me right off. But one particular characteristic was overt: she was brutally honest. She called a spade a spade. I could tell right away I would not have to wonder what she was thinking about any issue.

This morning after breakfast I checked my phone to read the text messages that had come in during the night. One was from her. It read in part, “Good morning my love already up and worked out read my Bible but most importantly prayed for you . . . ” No fluff. Just a sweet early morning greeting with a snapshot of her morning and a reminder that she had already prayed for me.

Because it was a text, the grammar was not the heart of the issue. (Anyone who knows me knows that my blood pressure spikes at the pervasiveness of atrocious grammar.) The heart of the issue was what it revealed about her, about her prayer, about her commitment to petition the Lord on behalf of her husband.

As I completed my morning regimen, I did my PT (physical training), my studies in Scripture, and prayed, I was encouraged by the wife God gave me.

Solomon wrote “An excellent wife is the crown of her husband” (Proverbs 12:4, ESV). She is a crowning achievement, a visual symbol of that which is beautiful.

This week my bride and I will celebrate over two decades of marriage together. I used to think I loved her thoroughly when we were younger and thinner and I could still hear and my hair was brown instead of gray. I did, of course.

But as the years have worn on, there are deeper beauties I have grown to treasure, too. And one of those deeper beauties is her commitment to brutally honest prayer.

When you wake to find your wife has texted you that she’s already prayed for you that morning, and you have a day of military duties ahead and ministry obligations that often remind you of man’s fallenness and of this world’s brokenness, it is salve for the soul, cold water to a thirsty spirit, to be reminded that “He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the LORD” (Proverbs 18:22, ESV).

Happy early anniversary to my Carrie Jane. You are loved.