The Dark Night

It  is 4:08 PM Saturday afternoon. In the old days we use to prepare for the Christian Sabbath on Saturday evenings. Now to me every day is the Lord’s Day. “Before this faith came, we were held prisoners by the law, locked up until faith should be revealed. So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith. Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law.” Galatians 3:23-25. I see my life through lenses of the Bible not through the eyes of post-modernism.

I keep forgetting to mention that books I have on the Gospel of Luke. I start reading the Gospel of Luke now that I finished reading the Gospel of Mark the other day. I was teaching the Gospel of Luke to an Adult Sunday class when I was forbidden to teach because I was no longer consider orthodox by Messiah Independent Reformed Church here in Holland. I got as far as the parable of the wineskins before I was told to no longer teach Sunday school. “He told them this parable: “No one tears a patch from a new garment and sews it on an old one. If he does, he will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskin. And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for he says, “The old is better.’” Luke 5:36-39

I hear movements upstairs. It is too early for Carol to be up. I will close to go look to see what is going on.

It was just Rudy our five year old dog walking around the dining room.

So I was teaching the Gospel of Luke when I was told by the ruling elders of MIRC to stop using my spiritual gifts. I have these books on the Gospel of Luke in my cell presently. I love the Four Gospels.

“Luke” [The NIV Application Commentary] by Darrell L. Bock

“Luke 1:1-9:50″ [Baker Exegetical Commentary On The New Testament] by Darrell L. Bock

“Luke 9:51-24:53″ [Baker Exegetical Commentary On The New Testament] by Darrell L. Bock (this two volume commentary on the Gospel of Luke by Bock is over 2000 pages long! Wow what a sweet spiritual treat!)

“The Gospel of Luke” [The New International Commentary On The New Testament] by Joel B. Green

“The Theology Of The Gospel Of Luke” [New Testament Theology] by Joel B. Green

“Luke 1-9:20″ [35A Word Biblical Commentary] by John Nolland

“Luke 9:21-18:34″ [35B Word Biblical Commentary] by John Nolland

“Luke 18:35-24:53″ [35C Word Biblical Commentary] by John Nolland

“The Gospel According To Luke I-IX” A New Translation With Introduction And Commentary by Joseph A. Fitzmyer [The Anchor Bible]

“The Gospel According To Luke X-XXIV” A New Translation With Introduction And Commentary by Joseph A. Fitzmyer

“The Gospel Of Luke” [The New Century Bible Commentary] by E. Earle Ellis

“Commentary on the Gospel of Luke” [The New International Commentary On The New Testament] by Norval Geldenhuys (this excellent commentary on Luke was given me to me as a gift by a close friend named Robert and Ruth Wilson Christmas 1985-this Christian couple are dear old saints-Carol and I met this couple when we were in seminary Reformed Theological Seminary Jackson Miss. Mr. Bob has given us many books over the year. He introduced our three children to the history of the War of Northern Aggression which is also known as the American Civil War)

“Lectures On The Gospel According To Luke” Two Volumes published in 1838 by Dr. James Foote Aberdeen Scotland

“Commentary On Luke” [New International Greek Testament Commentary] by I. Howard Marshall

“Luke: Historian And Theologian” by I. Howard Marshall

“The Narrative Unity Of Luke-Acts: A Literary Interpretation” Volume One: The Gospel According to Luke” by Robert C. Tannehill

“The Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts: A Literary Interpretation” Volume Two: The Acts of the Apostles” by Robert C. Tannehill

“Power from on High: The Spirit in Israel’s Restoration and Witness in Luke-Acts” by Max Turner

“Dictionary Of Jesus And The Gospels” Editors: Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight, I. Howard Marshall [A Compendium Of Contemporary Biblical Scholarship]

The above books are a good place to begin when studying the Gospel of Luke. Well I will close to see how Michigan State is playing against Penn State. It is almost 5 o’clock PM. Another day has gone down the drain.

music: Aphex Twin “Selected Ambient Works Volume II”

music: Dinosaur Jr. “Farm”

It is now 3:03 PM Saturday afternoon. I stopped watching the Ohio & Michigan college football game because Ohio was winning. I remember the days when Michigan was a powerhouse college football team. Now Michigan sucks.

I am down in our basement writing in my private diary and listening to the music of Aphex Twin. The sun is shining and I should go for a walk before it snows.

I received an e-mail telling me in the mail I will be receiving these two books soon—

“Old Testament Theology” Volume 3 “Israel’s Life” by John Goldingay

“Theology Of The New Testament” by Udo Schnelle Translated by M. Eugene Boring

Today I have been reading “Visions of Cody” by Jack Kerouac.

Yesterday when not going insane I read for devotions off and on “The Indelible Image: The Theological and Ethical Thought World of the New Testament” Volume One “The Individual Witnesses” by Ben Witherington III. I highly recommend this book for all born again followers of the Lord Jesus Christ.

I personally do not know anyone who reads serious Christian literature. Of course who do I really know? How can I come to know anyone since I always seeking to be a friend of God? I am just plain nuts.

Carol is sleeping and works tonight. After tonight she is off four nights. She told me she wants to clean our cage top to bottom since we are having company for the Thanksgiving national holy day. I told my wife the other day I like our cage caked with dust. I want our cage to reflect two people who are strangers and pilgrims in this world.

I think I read awhile back Udo Schnelle’s book “Apostle Paul: His Life and Theology” translated by M. Eugene Boring. I love the apostle Paul! It is sad to know very few Christians in the world read Pauline theology on their faces. We are living in the End Times. “Jesus said to them: “Watch out that no one deceives you. Many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am he’, and will deceive many. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, and famines. These are the beginning of the birth pains.” Mark 13:5-8.

When I was reading through the Old Testament this year I read these volumes by John Goldingay—

“Old Testament Theology” Volume One “Israel’s Gospel”

“Old Testament Theology” Volume Two “Israel’s Faith”

I am really excited about getting in the mail “Old Testament Theology” Volume 3 “Israel’s Life” by Goldingay. It is a blessing to be able to read Old Testament Theology as you watch modern Babylon burn to the ground.

What I find sad is seeing people all around me making love to Babylon The Great The Mother Of Prostitutes. (Revelations chapter 17 and 18 “In one hour she has been brought to ruin!” Rev. 18:19c).

Well I will close to watch another college football game. Maybe Michigan State will do us proud today in beating Penn State.

music: Aphex Twin “Drukqs”

It is 10:11 AM Saturday morning in the flow of being alive in a sin cursed american world. Everywhere you go in this screwed-up world you see the effects of the american death culture. Has america really made the world a better place to be a man or woman of God? Do you feel safe as a parent at night knowing your children must make a killing in this world?

I just got back from taking Carol’s dog Rudy for a walk at Kollen Park. It is a foggy morning. I did see some sun shining through the morning mist as I walked the dog.

I got up this morning around 7:12 AM. I got up because there was nothing else to do. I went outside to get the morning newspapers. I next made myself a cup of tea and looked through the newspapers.

Carol came home from work and went to bed after eating a snack. I went down in the basement and messed with my lap top before taking the dog for a walk. So goes by existence thus far.

I got out to look at today when not screaming with boredom “Luke” [The NIV Application Commentary] by Darrell L. Bock. (I hate the word “boredom” because I am never bored, just at a lost what to do with my Self. I need to lose awareness of my self in something like saving america from satan and his army of demons.)

Last night I watched television and read “Visions of Cody” by Jack Kerouac. I had a very small private party last night. The party was here and gone in a few seconds. What I really need is some wild music.

Well I will close to wait it out. I might watch this afternoon some college football.

music: Richard D. James Album: Aphex Twin

Arthur Koestler’s manic intellectual career by Christopher Hitchens

The Zealot [a book review]

I cannot recall a book title that was less well-shaped to its subject. Far from being a “skeptic,” Arthur Koestler was a man not merely convinced but actively enthused by practically any intellectual or political or mental scheme that came his way. When he was in the throes of an allegiance, he positively abhorred doubt, which he sometimes called “bellyaching.” If he was ever dubious about anything, one could say in his defense, it was at least about himself. He was periodically paralyzed by self-reproach and insecurity, and once wrote a defensive third-person preface to one of his later novels (The Age of Longing) in which he described its style as modeled on that of a certain “A. Koestler,” whose writing, “lacking in ornament and distinction, is easy to imitate.” The author himself was written off as “a much afflicted scribe of his time, greedy for pleasure, haunted by guilt, who enjoyed a short vogue and was then forgotten, like the rest of them.”

In fact, Koestler succeeded in achieving several things that transcended his own time and made him into what Danilo Kiš called the prototypical Central European intellectual. He was enabled to do them because he believed that the intellectual ought also to be a man of action. He took part in the antifascist struggles of the 1930s and ’40s first as a true-believing Communist and then as an ex-Communist, and out of this synthesis he generated at least one work of nonfiction (Spanish Testament) and one novel (Darkness at Noon), which between them helped redefine the essential struggle as the one against totalitarianism tout court. No other single individual, with the exception of George Orwell—upon whom Koestler had a marked influence—could claim as much. Second, he managed to register practically every phase, emotional and ideological, of diasporic engagement with Zionism. Third, he was able to demonstrate that an individual could make a difference in the battle of the behemoths that constituted the Cold War.

To be born Hungarian and Jewish and German-speaking is to start at a slightly odd angle to the world. For instance, Koestler was unusual in retaining what Michael Scammell calls “fond memories” of the 1919 Communist putsch in Hungary, a botched and bloody business that led many people to actually welcome the advent of the vengeful right as a deliverance. This right was organically hostile to Jewry, but not even that explains Koestler’s nostalgia for Béla Kun, which in any case makes an odd fit with his decision, as a refugee and student in Vienna, to join a nationalist dueling-and-drinking club that effectively molded young Jews into ersatz Germans. Once more his formation and evolution were against the traditional grain: most European Jews were drawn to Palestine by labor and socialist groups, but when Koestler set off for the Holy Land he did so as a consecrated follower of Vladimir Jabotinsky and the so-called Revisionists. Parlaying his fierce journalism from the Middle East into a job with a German newspaper syndicate in Berlin, Koestler was able to interview Einstein and begin a lifelong amateur engagement with science, while keeping up a keen interest in the subject of eugenics: a field that (in 1930s Germany, of all times and all places) he regarded as promising.

The word one might choose to describe this riot of enthusiasms and contradictions would be promiscuous. It would certainly sit very well with Koestler’s private life, which was a hectic, alarming, and sometimes violent blend of alcoholism and satyriasis. Scammell holds retrospective psychology to a minimum but cannot escape noticing Koestler’s flight from an overprotective mother or his keen awareness of his short stature. We have Koestler’s own word for it—in Arrow in the Blue, which I think is the best of his volumes of memoirs—that he habitually felt awkward and uneasy and sometimes an impostor. This book provides persuasive evidence of acute manic depression, combated in one way by sex and booze and in another by devotion to a series of causes. Otto Katz once said to him, “We all have inferiority complexes of various sizes, but yours isn’t a complex—it’s a cathedral.” Koestler liked this remark so much that he included it in his autobiography, thus attaining the status of one who could actually brag about his inferiority complex as if size mattered.

It was often believed in those days that absorption into the historic movement of the working class was the cure for the angst of the petit bourgeois and the deracinated intellectual. This could help explain the utterness of Koestler’s surrender to Communism. Not even a visit to the famine-racked U.S.S.R.—where he traveled around with a completely credulous Langston Hughes—was enough to unpersuade him. He set off for Spain and the civil war as a dedicated agent of the Comintern, and if the Spanish Fascists who arrested him had guessed his true identity, they would have shot him out of hand. Had they done so, they would have unknowingly dealt anticommunism a frightful blow. Koestler’s experience of Franco’s cells in Málaga, with victims dragged to execution almost every night, helped furnish the stark raw material for Darkness at Noon: certainly the best jail book since Victor Serge’s Men in Prison and almost as influential in combating Stalinism as Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Koestler’s decision to abandon Communism almost as soon as he had been freed from Spain—because of the hysterical faking of the Moscow purge trials in 1938—was expressed in such brilliantly diagnostic and dialectical terms that it bears quoting:

It is a logical contradiction when with uncanny regularity the leadership sees itself obliged to undertake more and more bloody operations within the movement, and in the same breath insists that the movement is healthy. Such an accumulation of grave surgical interventions points with much greater likelihood to the existence of a much more serious illness.

To say that Koestler’s zeal replicated itself in the anticommunist cause would be to say the least of it. Scammell takes us once again through the story of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the CIA, but spends time illustrating what few people understand even now: the CIA’s hold on the financing of intellectual warfare was actually used as a brake on volunteers like Koestler, who were regarded as too vitriolically anti-Soviet and temperamentally hostile to compromise.

Having temporarily abandoned Zionism for Communism, he resumed his engagement by covering (and participating in) the violent birth of Israel, initially taking the side of the Menachem Begin ultranationalists but eventually becoming sickened by the violence of the Zionist right and finally worrying whether there should be a Jewish state at all. Scammell is not quite in his depth here: he conflates the Stern gang and the Irgun and gives superficial treatment (as he also does, bizarrely, to Koestler’s part in producing The God That Failed) to a subsequent book, The Thirteenth Tribe. In this, his last semi-serious work, Koestler suggested that Ashkenazi Jews were actually descended from the lost people of Khazaria, who before vanishing from the northern Caucasus a thousand years ago had somehow opted to Judaize themselves. One implication of that theory was that no authentic Ashkenazi Jewish tie to Palestine could ever be established. “Arthur just rather enjoys betraying his former friends,”I remember Patricia Cockburn snorting when this effort was published in the 1970s.

That might have been unfair—she remembered how her husband, Claud, had sweated to get Koestler out of jail in Spain, only to be rewarded with apostasy—but in his last two decades Koestler abandoned every kind of scruple and objectivity and became successively bewitched by “theories” of levitation, ESP, telepathy, and UFOs. He was enthralled by Timothy Leary and played for a sucker by the paranormal spoon-bender Uri Geller. The sleep of his reason did not even bring forth monsters: poor Koestler simply gave a fair wind and his once-valued imprimatur to a succession of pathetic quacks and mountebanks.

In a noble if melodramatic way, Koestler had once held a sort of dress rehearsal for suicide with Walter Benjamin, as both contemplated being taken alive by the Gestapo. (He kept the pills Benjamin gave him, while the latter swallowed his on the Spanish border a few days later.) By comparison, his own suicide in 1983 was an affair very much lacking in grandeur. His mind and his body were certainly both giving way, but he seems to have allowed or perhaps encouraged his healthy wife, Cynthia, to join him in the extinction. An earlier study by David Cesarani was lurid to the point of sensationalism about Koestler’s callousness toward his wives and other women (to say nothing of other people’s wives). It has been plausibly alleged that in his compulsive seductions—of Simone de Beauvoir, for one—he did not always stop quite short of physical coercion. Scammell does his best to plead extenuation here, but is obviously uncomfortable. Just as many of the people who believe in numinous coincidence and supernatural intervention are secretly hoping to prove that it is they themselves who are the pet of the universe, so many of those who overcompensate for inferiority are possessed of titanic egos and regard other people as necessary but incidental. At least this case is a tragic one when considered as a life story, because it shows us what a noble mind was there o’erthrown.
Click here to find out more!
The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/hitchens-koestler

music: Pavement “Wowee Zowee”

It is 2:21 PM Friday afternoon. I am going through another day normal. Carol has gone to bed for the day. I have been reading and wandering my cell.

Carol wrote this Christ Mass letter today to go with Christ Mass cards—

I am at it early this year given the fact I did not send out any cards or letters last year and really don’t want to lose track of you and our friendship!
This past year Caleb Jon-the oldest of the three-was married on July 17 to Emily Caskey in Lapeer, Mich. They are continuing on in Boston where Caleb is finishing his PhD at Boston College and Emily (who hopes to go to nursing school) works in the nursing department there. It was a wonderful time together and is great having the family expand!
Josiah is in his fourth year teaching at Myamurrah High School in Gallup, NM. He’s doing some work with AP history classes and is expanding on his responsibilities with out of class activities. I am amazed the scope of challenges educators face today and all of you teachers out there have my utmost respect!
Bethany has taught first grade at Rehoboth Christian School in Rehoboth, NM. for two years now.She is about 5 minutes away from Josiah which is great for both of them. (And the momma as well!) She is to be married June 26, 2010 here in Holland to Andy Lynch-a man she met by way of his sister who lives at Rehoboth. Andy is an engineer presently employed in Phoenix, Az. and formerly from Grand Rapids, Mich. He was a year ahead of her at Calvin College but they did not know each other at that time. So we are back in wedding mode anticipating another wonderful event this summer!
I promise a picture with next years Christmas letter!
I am doing 12 hour night shifts at Holland Hospital as a Rapid Response nurse. It’s a lot of mentoring new nurses as well as covering emergencies on the floors and helping out in ED and the ICU. I’ve gotten pretty accomplished at IV starting in the process! It’s always an adventure there and I like not knowing what’s going to happen next. Outside of work there is always Mom in the nursing home to stay caught up on as well as the details of running a household. I always thought things would get easier when the kids were on their own but find the advancing years more of a challenge mentally and physically! It’s all good though as the grace of God truly keeps me going in His strength living one day at a time.
Jonny is basically home spending his time reading and writing in his private diary and his four online blogs. He lost his job 2 1/2 years ago and mainly given the dismal Michigan economy has not been subsequently employed. He takes Rudy on walks and goes downtown for mochas at least once a week. When he is downtown he likes to visit a local record shop and a used bookstore. Jonny enjoys listening to indie music and collecting books for his large book collection.
We hope you have a peaceful holiday season to close out 2009 and look forward to hearing about how you are doing!

This morning my wife was singing this old hymn as she got ready to meet another day—

The tender love a father has
For all his children dear,
Such love the Lord bestows on them
Who worship Him in fear.

The Lord remembers we are dust,
And all our frailty knows;
Man’s days are like the tender grass,
And as the flower he grows.

The flower is withered by the wind
That smites with blighting breath;
So man is quickly swept away
Before the blast of death.

Unchanging is the love of God,
From age to age the same,
Displayed to all who do His will
And reverence His Name.

Those who His gracious covenant keep
The Lord will ever bless;
Their children’s children shall rejoice
To see His righteousness.

It was 23 hours ago when I last wrote. Time just keeps rolling along. Some times I get sick of being aware of time. There is always time demanding you keep decaying.

Carol just left to visit her mother and go to a grocery store. I am down in the basement writing in my blogs.

It is another cold wet dark day. The weather has been plain ugly lately. Carol walked Rudy this morning so that is a chore I do not have to deal with.

I got out of bed this morning around 7:44 AM. Carol was up sitting in our living room reading the Bible.

This morning I finished reading in the New Testament the Gospel of Mark. Now it is on to the third gospel the Gospel of Luke.

Well there is not much else to report this morning. I spend a lot of time just sitting doing nothing these days. There is no reason to do anything these days. Was thinking this morning it is a miracle to have air to breath. If we did not have air we would die. Is there air in the world to come?

Last night I watched television from 7 o’clock PM till 11 o’clock PM. I had a hard time staying awake last night. Carol went to bed around 8:30 PM last night. There was no music last night or this morning. Carol works tonight and tomorrow night. Maybe tonight I will have a small private party?

Yesterday I read besides the Gospel of Mark these books when not falling asleep with pure boredom—

“The Augustan World: Life And Letters In Eighteenth-Century England” by A. R. Humphreys

“The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History” Zvi Ben-Dor Benite

The Apocryphal II Esdras chapter 13 “Then you saw him collecting a different company, a peaceful one. They are the ten tribes which were taken off into exile in the time of King Hoshea, whom Shalmaneser king of Assyria took prisoner. He deported them beyond the River, and they were taken away into a strange country.” II Esdras 13:39,40

I do not know what I will read today when I am not falling asleep? Time will go by. There is nothing we can do. All is a mystery. All we can do is keeping going and pray for grace.

“After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, he was taken up into heaven and he sat at the right hand of God. Then the disciples went out and preached everywhere, and the Lord worked with them and confirmed his word by the signs that accompanied it.” Mark 16:19,20

music: Pavement “Wowee Zowee” Sordid Sentinels Edition

It is 9:44 AM Thursday morning in the flow of existence. I am down in our basement reading the essays of George Orwell. I already read a couple chapters in the Gospel of Mark this morning.

I am having a hard time waking up this morning. Maybe I feel so tired in the morning because I am still feeling effects of the drugs I take at night to help me sleep? I should take a long walk this morning instead of sitting feeling wasted. Carol took Rudy for a walk this morning around our neighborhood.

I have no plans for the day. Carol has been cleaning this morning. My wife is always doing something. My goal is life is not to do anything. I want only to do the will of God.

I got up this morning around 6:55 AM. Carol got up around 6 o’clock AM this morning. She asked me this morning if I wanted to listen to music and I said No. I was too tired to listen to music. I must be getting old. How many men would say No to music? Maybe tonight we can listen to music?

Carol made a pot of oatmeal for breakfast. I messed with my lap top this morning and read my Bible.

Last night I read my books on the life of Samuel Johnson and watched television. Before going to sleep last night I read “Visions of Cody” by Jack Kerouac. So existence keeps speeding along.

I will close to wander my cell. Carol took our bedding to a local laundry mat and should be home anytime. Carol is cleaning our bedroom. She hates dust. I find delight in seeing existence covered with a layer of dust. Everything around us is in a state of decay.

“At that time men will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens.” Mark 13:26,27

“No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard! You do not know when that time will come. It is like a man going away: He leaves his house in charge of his servants, each with his assigned task, and tells the one at the door to keep watch. Therefore keep watch because you do not know when the owner of the house will come back-whether in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or at dawn. If he comes suddenly, do not let him find you sleeping. What I say to you, I say to everyone: ‘Watch!’” Mark 13:32-37

music: Sunset Rubdown “Dragonslayer”