The art of questioning
I visited the West Philly Mennonites today morning again to worship with them. Today, they have a guest preacher, who is apparently a member of the congregation (perhaps an Anabaptist seminary student somewhere in Philly?) The topic of his sermon was very interesting. It was about the role of questions in the communications between the human race and the Divine.
There's an old joke. A Jewish student raised his hand and asked his rabbi why was it that whenever someone asks a question, the rabbi replied by asking him more questions. The rabbi smiled, "Why not?"
Our preacher reminded us that God, in a way, spoke to the prophets, etc, in exactly the same way. When he asked Adam "where are you?" and Cain "where is your brother?" God is essentially reminding man of his two relationships, vis-a-vis God, and vis-a-vis his brother/neighbor. ("Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength...Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these.")
Similar questions can be found throughout the Testaments.
Which reminds me of an important one, "For what shall it profits a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and forfeit his own soul?" The same question was directed to Sir Richard Rich by Sir Thomas More, when the former perjured against him.
My friend Hugh
I went to my friend Hugh's place to have tea with him again. A psychiatrist by training and a Penn Med alum, he is always the smiling gentleman I met at Arch Street Friends Meeting, ever so gentle and mild-mannered, ever so laid back.
I really like him. He is such a kind and relaxed person.
BTW-he mentioned to me that he and his wife Faye will be visiting their son in Boston this coming November, so hopefully I will be able to be a good host.
Daily life
It is good that I have recovered from my headache yesterday rather speedily. I will be leaving for Boston on Aug 30, on train. In the meantime, I'll probably have to finish all the mundane tasks of mailing my suitcases and buying the train-ticket, etc.
Last Sunday I worshipped at the West Philadelphia Menonnite Fellowship, housed in a United Methodist Church on 47th and Baltimore. It was very refreshing, and I definitely loved the Mennonite Psalms and Hymns. The pastor, Fred J. Kaufmann, was a very well-travelled person, and the leader of our worship that morning was also very energetic.
Thinking too much
I am in quite a headache right now, thanks to information overflow caused by over-intensive readings. Never read Schumpeter, Marx, the Bible and a couple of other philosophers and theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr together on the same day. It's not good for our health. Weight-lifting and beer drinking didn't help this time either.
The opening that leads to ecstasy and refreshment can also lead to their flipsides.
Congrats Joan!!
My little sis Joan has just received her last report card: she scored straight-A's in all her A-Level exams! This means that all her conditional place offers from universities in the UK has become unconditional ones, and I believe she will be starting a 5-year master in science in biochemistry program at the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of London.
I have looked the program up, and it seems that it involves 4 years of academic studies and 1 year of internship in the biochemical industry. It is kind of like a submatriculation masters program in the U.S., except that one makes the decision to submatriculate from the very beginning.
In the Unity of the Holy Spirit
I think I have finally found a common thread in the thoughts of every philosopher, theologian, sage I have studied and the Son of Man: Erich Fromm, Adam Schaff, young Marx, Leo Tolstoy, Chun-I T'ang, Yangming Wang, Mencius, St. John the Evangelist, St. James the Just, George Fox, Meister Eckhart and Jesus Christ the Son of Man. I have finally, finally understood why Christ has referred to Himself as the Son of Man, which means literally the Child of Humanity.
I am way too overwhelmed to spell this out, and here I would only mention briefly what I have observed: it has to do with the mystery of the First and Second Adam, the natural and the spiritual men. It has to do with one and only one thing: the realization of the Spirit, the Inward Light of Christ endowed to every individual born into the world (Tolstoy, Mencius, Yangming Wang, St. John, George Fox and our Lord and Savior), and the self-creating praxis that is the necessary result of this realization (St. James the Just, Karl Marx, Yangming Wang, Meister Eckhart and yes Jesus)
I cannot believe this, how can a historical materialist and a Dominican monk had the same thing in mind! A humanist psychologist and the Son of God?
Major General Smedley Butler, USMC, the "Fighting Quaker"
Maj. Gen. Smedley "Fighting Quaker" Butler (1881-1940), of Haverford, Pennsylvania, was the most decorated officer of the U.S. Marine Corps in history and a two-time recipient of the Medal of Honor, by the time of his death in 1940.
Son of a 15-term Pennsylvanian Congressman, Thomas S. Butler (R-PA, 1897-1927) and descendent of a long line of Quakers, Butler nevertheless joined the marine corps after finishing high school at Haverford School. After seeing action in Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, New Mexico, Honduras, the West Front, and China, General Butler finally concluded, in the early 30s, that every single war effort he previously contributed to was no more than collective racketeering. He became a staunch Pacifist. It was also in 1933 that he, together with other veteran generals of the U.S. Armed Forces, revealed the J.P. Morgan plot of coup d'etat against FDR.
His Biography:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler
You see, it is my belief that we need more men and women like General Butler to become advocates of peace, and fewer soft-bellied "modern liberals" who know nothing but to embarass the Pacifist cause by spewing their oh-so-1960s ideology in public and their private-interest-motivated-draft-dodging history. (Ah, this immediately brings to mind "Friends" who became "Quakers" back in their college days precisely for the evasion of military duties, and nothing more, no Inner Light, no Spirit, no nothing...)
Roland Fryer Jr.
Dr. Roland Fryer, of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, is an economist with a most unusual background. A former gang member who had 8 relatives who either served jail sentences or was murdered, he graduated with highest honors from college in economics, and subsequently studied with Glenn C. Loury (Boston University) and Gary Becker (University of Chicago, Nobel Laureate.) A junior fellowship in the Society of Fellows is a very prestigious post-doctoral appointment, and among those scientists who were appointed in the past were titans such as Noam Chomsky.
He's been doing some very interesting research on the underachievements of African American students in schools, and have been applying the most rigorous mathematical tools and models on this mostly-studied-by-sociologists issue. The results are startling yet revealing of the psychological racial divide in our schools. I really admire this man.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/magazine/20HARVARD.html?ei=5090&en=e9727ddcbbbd4431&ex=1268974800&partner=rssuserland&pagewanted=print&position=
Renovare
I am thinking of forming a small spiritual formation group once I get to Harvard. It should be modelled after the ones originally introduced by "Renovare"'s founder Richard Foster. I am increasingly convinced that spiritual formation should not be treated as individual matter. Instead, Christians must bond with one another and mature spiritually by mutual encouragement. This impression has been greatly enforced by a sermon I heard the First Day before last weekend, by Anita Weber at Middletown Meeting. She noted how difficult and painful it must have been for the prophet Jeremiah to have remained solitary throughout his whole life with not a single comrade to support him but the Spirit of God. She also pointed out how fortunate Friends have been, having mechanisms such as Business Meeting, etc. to help them in discerning the Divine will.
How hard it is!
But then how difficult it is for man to break through the bondage he has imposed upon himself! How hard it is for us to simply "be," without caring about what we have! How impossible it is for religious people to pay heed and obey the still small voice of God! And how miserable is the secular man who struggle to live out his conscience! The will of the Divine, the Truth and the Light revealed to our conscience within is like the wind, which blows where it wills, we hear the sound of it, but we do not know where it comes from, or where it is going. (John 2:8)
Even without the Big Brother, without Josef Stalin, without Hitler, or the KKK, or all the ancient tyrants who burned books and persecuted they who questioned, man is still his own slave. Gradually but steadily he has given up himself to be eaten up by his alienated self.
Vladimir Mayakovsky and a bygone era of hope
I have read some of Vladimir Mayakovsky's Modernist poetry these days, and I'm left quite speechless by his stunning genius and his mastery of literary images.
Defying the pre-Revolutionary norms of Russian poetry, Mayakovsky injected a kind of spunkiness and boldness unknown before in any literature into his works, often utilizing borderline bizarre imagery: he dreamed of patting the Sun at his back, chatting with him about literature; he refers to poetic rhyme as "a keg of dynamite" which is "blown sky-high in a strophe" when the line as the fuse is "burned to the end."
A most individualistic eccentric, Mayakovsky was nonetheless hailed as the Poet Laureate of the USSR by none other than Josef Stalin, and his ultimate suicide in 1930 for reasons unknown marked the end of an era. An era of unprecedented flowering in the arts and culture in Russia, following the October Revolution and ended with the Great Purges. It was a time when Sergey Eisenstein experimented with the art of montage in modern cinema, it was a time when Vsevolod Meyerhold tried with experimental theater, and it was also a time when Ilya Repin solidified his position as the ultimate Socialist Realist. But these too would eventually come to an end, when every spark of creativity is extinguished and every creative soul stiffled.
It's worth noting how Mayakovsky himself described his reasons for his suicide, "And, as they say, the incident is closed./Love's boat has smashed against the daily grind./Now life and I are quits. Why bother then/to balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts."
Earlier he has written about how "Proletarians/arrives at communism/from below--/by the low way of mines,/sickles,/and pitchforks--/but I,/from the poetry's skies,/plunges into communism,/because/without it/I feel no love."
Isn't this interesting? Communism was intended as a solution to end all human bondage to things alien to us, to set us free to be who we are, to empower us to love, not to yearn for alienated possessions, yet it is precisely under communism that man has lost his ultimate freedom even to think or to love. It is not surprising at all then Mayakovsky had to die for he "feel no love."
Anyone recall the ending of 1984? The day when a man is not even allowed to love the girl he used to adore? The day when 2 + 2 = 5? The day when Winston confessed his "love" for the Big Brother?
E-rumour
Here's one of my favorite online rumors. It's aimed at the famous German theologian/philosopher Paul Tillich. Tillich in a sense is an existentialist, although his views on Christianity had certainly been much more modernist than the founder of Christian Existentialism Soren Kierkegaard. Or let's put it this way, unlike the Neo-Orthodox Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Reinhold Niebuhr, Dr. Tillich's essentially a theological liberal.
The rumour itself is about a confrontation between Tillich and an old African American pastor; a clash between intellectual treatment of religion and experiential faith.
TASTE MY JESUS
At the University of Chicago Divinity School each year they have what is called "Baptist Day." On this day each one is to bring a lunch to be eaten outdoors in a grassy picnic area. Every Baptist Day the school would invite one of the greatest minds to lecture in the theological education center.
One year they invited Dr. Paul Tillich. Dr.Tillich spoke for two and one-half hours proving that the resurrection of Jesus was false. He quoted scholar after scholar and book after book. He concluded that since there was no such thing as the historical resurrection, the religious tradition of the church was groundless, emotional mumbo-jumbo, because it was based on a relationship with a risen Jesus, who, in fact, never rose from the dead in any literal sense.
He then asked if there were any questions. After about 30 seconds, an old, dark skinned preacher with a head of short-cropped, woolly white hair stood up in the back of the auditorium. "Docta Tillich, I got one question," he said, as all eyes turned toward him. He reached into his sack lunch and pulled out an apple and began eating it. "Docta Tillich" . . . CRUNCH, MUNCH. "My question is a simple question." CRUNCH, MUNCH . . ."Now, I ain't never read them books you read . . . CRUNCH, MUNCH, and I can't recite the Scriptures in the original Greek. I don't know nothin about Niebuhr and Heidegger." . . . CRUNCH, MUNCH . . . He finished the apple. "All I wanna know is: This apple I just ate - was it bitter or sweet?"
Dr. Tillich paused for a moment and answered in exemplary scholarly fashion, "I cannot possibly answer that question, for I haven't tasted your apple." The white-haired preacher dropped the core of his apple into his crumpled paper bag, looked up at Dr. Tillich and said calmly,"Neither have you tasted my Jesus."
The 1,000 plus in attendance could not contain themselves. The auditorium erupted with applause and cheers. Dr. Tillich thanked his audience and promptly left the platform.
Some further understanding
I have further understood the distinction made by Yangming Wang (1472-1529) between "being angry" and "being mad." Whereas it is perfectly acceptable that one should become angry over injustice done either to ourselves or to others, it is not right that one should get "mad" easily. In Chinese, getting mad is described as "dong qi," which Wang describes as "having one's personal emotions stirred/disturbed" Righteous anger, on the other hand, should have nothing to do with emotions. At all. The same with love. Love is not a feeling, it should instead be a mode of existence: the perfect way for us to extend ourselves to others.
hard time
I often had a hard time reading some of the Postmodern philosophers, such as the Critical Theorists G. Lukacs and E. Bloch. Sometimes their writings came off as obscure to me. I tried "Lenin: a Study of the Unity of His Thought," "History and Class Consciousness" and "Atheism in Christianity," but couldn't move past the first chapters...
I figured that the better way for me to have a taste of the cultural milieu of the 20th century is to read literary works. To this end, I'm half done with Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" and Vladimir Mayakovsky's collection of poems. Both were masters of their languages. Mayakovsky particularly has a very peculiar Modernist (correct me if I were wrong in this) presentation.
new friends
It was really nice that I should come across my friend Andy Smith on the streets last week! Tonight I am going to do some cooking with him and another friend Lisa Li, who is from Beijing. Andy is currently working at a legal aid center for recent immigrants, and he has recently finished his first year at Harvard Law School. Lisa is a friend whom I met in my stat class last semester.
I have also hanged out with my landlady (who is really nice) quite often, her being a fellow-Pennsylvanian. She is currently rounding up her summer school sessions here at Penn, and will spend some time surfing in Cali in late August (oh well I suppose I don't have to be jealous about this...)
Recent readings
I have been reading avidly these days, not having much else to do (except working out and lifting weights with my buddy Albert P. Kim, who had received some previous training in the ranger school of the US Army.)
I read another book by Prof. Chun-I T'ang (in Chinese), mainly on the realities in a humanistic world. It is interesting since towards the end of the book Prof. Tang wrote a long poem. It took the form of a series of cantos of songs sung by great sages and philosophers, from time immemorial to the modern ages. Among the singers we have Nietzsche, Marx, Schoepenhauer, Spinoza, Kant, Schiller and Plato. The ultimate bedrocks of Christian, Indian and Chinese worldviews, namely, the Buddha, Confucius and Jesus were represented by Bodhisattva Nagarjuna, Tzu Ssu and St. Augustine respectively. It is a very interesting experience reading these.
Another philosophical essay I read was by the Rev. Fr. Bernhard Bolzano (1781-1848), a Czech educator, theologian, analytic philosopher and most importantly mathematician. As a mathematician he proved the Bolzano theorem, made important discoveries that eventually led to the Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem in real analysis, and constructed the famous Bolzano function (a function that is continuous but nowhere differentiable.) A Catholic priest and professor of the philosophy of religion at Charles University of Prague, Fr. Bolzano was a vocal supporter of liberal education and political reform. For these, he was dismissed from his university post, and was subjected to a 4-year long ecclesiastical trial which fortunately ended in his acquittal.
The essay itself was called "On the Mathematical Method," and was (I suspect)among the first papers published on metamathematics and the philosophy of language. In the first half of the book Bolzano wrote very clearly on his notions of "ideas," "intuitions," "concepts," "propositions," "explications," "objects" etc. and the relationships that could hold between them, such as "contradictory to," "contrary to," "compatible" and "incompatible." In the second half he addressed issues of what constitutes an axiom, an "explication," a definition and how a mathematician should present forth his propositions and ideas (how he should arrage the order of theorems to be presented, etc.) His notions of the axiomatics are by far more sophisticated than earlier logicians from Euclid to Kant. His essay is the kind of writing that is so precise, terse and rigorous that it almost hurts the eye to read! It was only 40 page long but it took me two days to finish reading it.
