Updates, Baby-hugging Tour and Wierd Winter

We're back, having arrived in a brief outpouring of sleety snow. 2175 miles, four hugged babies and one hugged toddler, numerous wonderful hugged adults, three rounds of golf and several completed novels, a couple of great daughter-created meals and two DVD viewings of "Wallace and Gromit and the Were-Rabbit" later. One of the babies was a bonus, the 13-month old daughter of one of B's good college friends, whose visit coincided with our own. (Maybe she could be classified as a toddler instead of a baby, but in any case, R is a neat little gal whom we enjoyed a lot as she played with Andrew and Meghan.) Karen returns by plane to G.R. tomorrow afternoon.

Remember my speculation about the state of spring after the wierdly-warm January? Well, we've gotten our comuppance. I had planted six big pots of spring bulbs last fall, hoping for a spectacular display in March. They grew in the too-warm and too-light garage. For a week before we left I had a merry display of tete-a-tete daffodils which no one could see in the garage, and so (the weather channel promising (falsely) a moderately warm two weeks here), I put them out for passers-by to enjoy while we were gone. The temperatures dropped and the bits of yellow looked mighty shivery and defeated when we pulled into the driveway today. Normally the daffs are out in force by the end of spring break in front of the student center; I'll bet when we go in on Monday (to celebrate I.S. Monday among other things), they won't even be in bud.

We have great remembrances of swaths of redbud along the GA and NC (in particular) and VA roads though to carry us through. We don't even dream about redbud here until May.

Baby-hugging Tour, midway...

I'm writing from Atlanta (Marietta) GA where the pear trees have already gone from blossom to leaf, the forsythia and spring bulbs are in full bloom, and the alazeas are ready to pop. The babies are pretty spectacular too. Drew is a cute ten-week old, laid-back little guy. Claire is seven weeks going on two weeks (since she was a five week premie--acting very much like a newborn), ready to squeal if life is not immediately good but mostly she just commands adoration. Their moms and dads readily shared them with us. Karen has been in second heaven. Chuck thinks he is due a golf game for every new baby and so far he has kept pace with two of them. Those plus a couple hours at a driving range sent him back to his novels and a stack of papers to grade and NCAA b-ball tournaments to watch today. (I managed to finish my 700-page commentary on Genesis with lots to chew on. Perhaps I will write more later.)

Tomorrow we leave for Chapel Hill and our own "baby"...looking forward to a weekend there before the next set of real babies in Virginia Beach VA, a stop to see our recouperating friend, S, at her farm, and then on to J's in southwestern PA.

Educating Father Abraham: The meaning of fatherhood

I promised a post about my reading of The Beginning of Wisdom by Leon Kass. The title above is the title of the article that appeared in First Things in Dec. 1994 that I had rememberd (vaguely, wanting to return to it and delighting when I discovered the whole book) which is now substantially one of the chapters in this book. I do believe that in Nov. 1994 FT is the chapter on educating Abraham about marriage. Kass' approach, based on 30 plus years of teaching a seminar on Genesis at the U Chicago, is to read the first book of the Torah exegetically as he would read Plato or Aristotle, to seek "wisdom regarding human life lived well in relation to the whole." The title tells it all--the beginning of wisdom...well, you know the Psalm...resides in the fear of the Lord.

Genesis, he claims, "begins with a comprehensive and universal panorama of the entire cosmic whole (chap. 1), moves to naturalistic and universal portraits of human life (chap 2), and concludes with the emergence of a tiny and distinctive people, bearing a new and distinctive human way on the earth (chap 12-50). Throughout, the text is concerned with this question: Is it possible to find, institute, and preserve a way of life, responsive to both the promise and the peril of the human creature, that accords with man's true standing in the world and that serves to perfect his god-like possibilities?"

Even though Kass does not believe that Adam and Eve FELL into sin (but rather realized the essence of human life), he does not discount the power of sin both personal and cultural. The major thrust of the chapters about pre-Abraham life is that humans cannot survive on their own power and wit. As Babel is the final evidence, they will destroy themselves. They need an education from God that can be transmitted down through the generations. Abraham was the person God chose to so educate and his education was both personal and political. He had to have a rightly ordered family life in order to produce a rightly ordered nation. Any young father/mother who desires to pass on his faith in God (of course, Kass does not say Christ) ought to read these chapters about what God taught Abraham through all his adventures and trials. (And you can do so in the FT editions if you don't want the full 700 page book). I'll just type out one paragraph of his summary after the binding of Isaac story:

"Father Abraham, I submit, is the model father, both of his family and of his people [though he did not start out this way, hardly!]--yes, even in his willingness to sacrifice his son--because he reveres God, the source of life and blessing and the teacher of righteousness, more than he loves his own. ... He is a model...because he sets an admiralbe example for proper paternal rule, in which the love of one's own children is put in the service of the right, the good, and the holy.

He goes on to say that all of us human fathers (parents) devote our children to some "god" or other...But a true father will devote his son to--and will self-consciously and knowingly initiate him into--only the righteous and godly ways. ... He will not finally love his son solely because he is his own, but will loveonly that in his son which is good and is open to the good, including his son's own capacity for awe before the divine. In this sense at least, he is ever willing to part with his son as his son, recognizing him--as was Isaac, and as are indeed all children--as a gift and a blessing, from God."

Well, this is just a taste of his style. He coaxes these insights out of the text, line by line. Fascinating. And from a perspective that evangelicals can appreciate but which is not our own so that we have much to learn from it.

Lenten (and other) reading

If you have any curiosity to spare in your busy lives, you are probably wondering why my list of books read in 2006 is growing so slowly. Two reasons: one the frenzy of cleaning that has possessed me since the first of the year. It reached such a peak that we have swept out the cat along with the extra books, clothing, doo-dads and other clutter though it will take months to rid the house of his hair. (The animal shelter assures us that he is very beautiful and adoptable and that we can come and visit him any time we want until that magic day. Think of us as we tell Karen on Friday....) The other is that I am reading a 700 page Jewish commentary on Genesis with so much to chew on that I am not making very fast progress. And then because I wanted to mark it up, at about page 275, I ordered a copy of my own. Now I have to go back and mark up what I had previously read. The Beginning of Wisdom by Leon Kass. This hereby alerts the young father(s) among my readers to a post I hope to make later this week summing up what he says Genesis teaches us about paternity and transmission of faith to the next generation (and a link to an article version of that key chapter). Anyone interested in Kass' teaching about the covenant can read it as well.

That said, I have added two books for Lenten reading. Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace by Miroslav Volf. I learned of it on the Byron Borger Hearts and Minds Bookstore webpage but have since learned that the Archbishop of Canterbury made it the Anglican Church's official 2006 Lent Book. And for good reason. Volf is a Croatian Americian theologican teaching at Yale, best known for his Exclusion and Embrace, who has spoken at IVCF grad/faculty conferences. Two excerpts from today's portion: "That's the paradox of self-love: The more you fill the self, the more it echoes with the emptiness of unfulfillment. Living in itself and for itself, the self remains mysteriously unsatisfied and insatiable...The paradox of true love is exactly the opposite...: When loving truly, the self moves outside of itself to dwell with God and neighbor, and only then is it truly at home" (52). and "Every gift [in this case that you are giving, not that you have received from God] breaks the barrier between the sacred and the mundane and floods the mundane with the sacred. When a gift is given, life because extraordinary because God's own gift giving flows through the giver" (54).

Kids (and Kids at Heart) Say the Darndest Things

Karen has a new sweetheart. (She thinks it's more than that, but how we handle those desires is a story for another day.) Tomorrow night she and Mike and lots of other graduates of the Christian Learning Center are going to attend the CLC's annual semi-formal banquet. She is going to wear the sparkly purple dress purchased for her cousin Emily's wedding; Mike is going to wear a tux! Excitement is running high. She told me during our evening phone call last night that she has butterflies in her stomach. "How can butterflies get into your stomach?" asked one of her literalist housemates. "Silly," she said, "That's just an expression." I laughed and (always the English teacher) said, "Yes, we call that expression a metaphor." "Oh, mom," she replied, "Did you have a lot of metaphors at your wedding?"