6.29.2005

Robert Frost for Inspiration

As you may or may not have noticed, the Jetta Resurrection has been silent lately. Our staff writer has been worker overtime in a remote location, far away from any kind of "high speed" internet and has consequently been unable to write with any amount of his mediocre skill. In order to diminish the unfortunate rift of posting regularity, we offer you, faithful readers, a wonderful poem. Enjoy!


Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

6.17.2005

Bruggeman!

The odd testimony of Israel puts forth a theological claim that is profoundly subversive of the present. Israel has known, ever since the barrenness of Sarah, that there is a deep incongruity between the intention of Yahweh and the circumstance of lived experience. Israel, in the face of that incongruity, did not have many alternatives. It could accept the circumstance of its life as the true state of reality-thus, for example, Sarah is barren and then the promise is voided within one generation. The alternative, Israel's chosen one is most seasons, is to rely on Yahweh's oath as a resolve to override circumstance, so that it is the oath and not the circumstance that tells the truth about reality. In this theological intentionality, Israel embraces this uttered testimony as the true version of its life.

--Walter Bruggeman, Old Testament Theology

6.15.2005

XXI

A monk ran into a party of handmaids of the Lord on a certain journey. Seeing them he left the road and gave them a wide berth. But the Abbess said to him: If you were a perfect monk, you would not even have looked close enough to see that we were women.

--Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert

6.13.2005

Oh No He Didn't!



Look at them all... so nice and lined up like that.