meditations-meanderings

     Aesthetics is the study of beauty.  Philosophy departments at colleges and universities offer courses in the subject.  Books have been written.  I love the title of one by Immanuel Kant, On the Sublime and Beautiful.

What constitutes beauty?  A number of things, I suppose, not least of which is the fruit, and not merely the fact, of beauty.  Mere facts reduce the truth to a caricature of definition or a series of axioms, or (in the case of beauty) mere appearance.

The great beauties of Hollywood are cases in point.  Many of them were stunning on screen, their beauty lending a charisma of presence to a film.  But it is best we only know them on screen.  Beauty must be more than the trappings of celluloid.

    I am pleased to report that construction on the interior of our new church building has begun.  We are embarking upon a partial fit-out, meaning that we are working to complete our Fellowship Hall, church nursery and office and lavatories. 

That will be enough to get us into our building.  We don’t as of yet have all the money we need to do even that, but we have always found God to be faithful, regardless of whether we are faithful or faithless.

The Lord had lain upon my heart from the very inception of planning for a new church building that we would have our building (i.e. stone and mortar) when He had His building (i.e. His people).

    Please attend to the following definition across which I have come in recent days:

“The gospel is the good news of God’s saving activity in the person and work of Christ.  This includes his incarnation in which he took to himself full (yet sinless) human nature; his sinless life which fulfilled the perfect law of God; his substitutionary death which paid the penalty for man’s sin and satisfied the righteous wrath of God; his resurrection demonstrating God’s satisfaction with his sacrifice; and his glorification and ascension to the right hand of the Father where he now reigns and intercedes for the church.

    How does one begin to discuss the significance of Jesus Christ?  One runs the risk of presumption, in the very least, let alone deficiency of description. 

His Name amounts to everything from lip-service to religious musak.  It makes some people nervous, others violent, still others sentimental; for some, His Name is Life.

We date history by His birth.  An entire civilization has been labeled “Christian.”  His mode of execution has come to adorn everything from cemeteries to ear-lobes.
His birth and resurrection remain watersheds of each calendar year.

Who was He?  He was born Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph the carpenter and Mary, his young bride. 

I hadn’t been outside in nearly two weeks!  Oh, I went out to perform pastoral tasks or to go to the store, but I hadn’t been out to go out or be out for two weeks because of the insidious heat that has been ransacking the northeast and mid-Atlantic.

We had an extraordinarily harsh winter in Philadelphia.  It was brutal for many but, for the Lacey family, it was like a warm womb, as my wife and I ministered to my terminally ill mother within the confines of our home. 

I have rarely found summer to be palatable.  Air-conditioning and the Boston Red Sox are the only things I actually like about summer, and I haven’t been attending to my beloved Sox this year - though I am thanking God for air-conditioning!

    The Duke of Wellington was the military savior of western civilization when he defeated Napoleon on the field of Waterloo in Belgium in 1815.  His status and popularity in its day knew no bounds and is today rivaled only by uber-celebrities.

The Duke of Wellington as a politician and statesman was another story.  One historian commented that “He might be a national hero, but like other national possessions he was reduced to constitutional proportions.”

It had to have been humbling.  Wellington the soldier simply had to issue orders, but Wellington the politician and statesman had to debate and discuss, and to attend to the opinions of others and reckon with parliamentary votes and public pressures.

A lady lives here.  A little one she is, but still a lady.  Let us refer to her as the Little Lady.  And the Little Lady has taken up residence with us, her presence adorning our home with the special grace that only a little lady the likes of her can offer.

I never reared children, so my impression was that the rearing and nurturing of little ones was consuming of time, energy and attention but, if they were one's own, it was well worth such expenditure.

I own that the little lady is well worth it!  Amber brings a personality singular in its capacity to enchant and to be enchanted, to laugh and to be a source of laughter, and, most importantly, to love and to be loved. 

My guys lost.  The final score was 83-79.  The Boston Celtics were ahead at one point during the game by thirteen points, but couldn’t nail down the win.  The Los Angeles Lakers did.  It was heartbreaking, but life goes on, as they say.

It hurt all the more, though, that it came at the hands of their arch-nemesis.  The Celtics and Lakers are the matter and anti-matter of professional sports.  Their games are more like cataclysmic battles than sporting events.

Sometimes you lose no matter how hard you try, no matter how good you appear to be faring, even when victory seems to be a sure thing, and even when the event has all the hallmarks of an edifying end-result.

I was blessed with a fine father.  He was an honorable man of the old school.  He didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve, but I always knew that he dearly loved me.

He was an attorney who handled a great deal of criminal law in his earlier years of practice.  One day he was handed a manila envelope stuffed with money while sitting on a park bench.  It was right out of a movie! 

He threw it to the ground, turned his back and walked away.  I asked him many years later why he didn’t take it; he replied that he never wanted to do anything that would make his twin boys ashamed of him.  We never were.

There exists in modern society something called the “think-tank.”  They operate in places like New York and Washington, or around and within leading academic institutions.  They are highly prestigious places boasting deep reserves of intellectual firepower.  They specialize in analytical, strategic and specialized thought.

One would think that we could think ourselves out of all kinds of problems and into fruitful pastures of pleasure and harmony and peace.   Yea, right!  My comment is not meant to be cynical, simply literarily facetious to make a point.