So that I will not be accused of only making lists of heavy and depressing stuff like doubts, here is installment #1 of “Things I Like”! I have put “10-2005″ in the title, which implies but does not do anything like promise that this will be a monthly series. The list is not supposed to be particularly deep, so please do not feel injured that I do not mention our relationship, or Jesus, or anything like that. But do remember that I spend most of my days coding, and so a lot of this will be my inner nerd coming out. Here is the list, in no particular order:
Monthly Archive for October, 2005
Well, even though I promised I would try and maintain two separate weblogs for two separate purposes, I failed. I guess I just can’t handle that much literary self-distintegration.
I’m now pretty much exclusively writing at my teleios weblog, which, although it has less snazzy of a design, was in fact completely coded by me (take that, Movable Type!) and exists in a network of a bunch of other cool people’s weblogs. So please make sure to be checking that site as frequently as you used to check this one, or better yet go there and subscribe to the RSS feed, or even better yet sign up and choose to get e-mail notifications when new entries are posted.
So for now, farewell from jonathanlipps.com/weblog!
Right now, it frustrates me to have people just assume that I believe, or even to be around people whom I fairly or unfairly believe just assume, the following things:
I’m in a really awesome spiritual community here in Palo Alto. There aren’t that many of us right now, but it’s getting sizable enough where sometimes I want to do the following exercise: sit everyone down for an hour, give them 1 piece of paper and a pen, and say, “Answer these questions on paper: what are we trying to become, and why, and how do you feel about that?”. Then, we each read our “papers” aloud to the others.
There are other ways to ask the question of course–what is the goal of this community? Why are we doing this? What is it we are doing exactly? Why are we here? But my favorite is still, “what are we trying to become, and why?”
My bet is that people would not all write the same thing, nor would they feel the same about what others wrote. What does that mean? How much should we want to “be on the same page” (i.e., have unity of vision), what does it take to get there, and what’s worth sacrificing for it?
This video has been one of my close companions over the last few weeks, reminding me what I love to dream about most. You may have already seen it; if not, an incredible experience awaits!
On a spur of the moment, I went to see the last showing of Serenity tonight at a local theater. I’d seen previews for it during Batman Begins, and thought, “Oh no, another mediocre sci-fi flick with none-too-great special effects and bad acting.” But since it opened a few days ago, I’ve been hearing nothing but positive things from people whom I trust to know better, so I thought I’d give it a chance.
My conclusion, after seeing it, was that it’s probably the best sci-fi movie I have seen in the theaters, for as long as I can remember. The problem with sci-fi movies is that they’re typically either “sci-fi”, meaning, not sci-fi in spirit, but set in space, so everyone thinks it’s sci-fi, or that they’re sci-fi in spirit, but horribly written and acted or produced.
Well, almost a year after I started, I’ve finished the Kierkegaard Anthology which has been fueling my imagination (and my weblog entries) recently. As I look back on the small but important bits I read of his writings, I believe they will have a lasting impact, and be one of the ways in which I remember developing over the past year. The last piece which the editor included was The Unchangeableness of God, a sermon Kierkegaard gave which was published close to the end of his life, somewhat contemporary with his more scalding critiques of Christendom.
I want to leave you, my good reader who has valiantly suffered through my musings on Kierkegaard, with something he said near the end of the address, and which I think is what Kierkegaard himself would have wanted us to remember maybe more than anything else in his massive corpus:
Imagine a solitary wayfarer, a desert wanderer. Almost burned by the heat of the sun, languishing with thirst, he finds a spring. O refreshing coolness! Now God be praised, he says–and yet it was merely a spring he found; what then must not he say who found God!