CowPi Journal

It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil—which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.

— Richard Feynman

I agree. Which means that: one, the good Mr. Feynman has too narrow a definition of religion (and concept of God); two, there is more to the meaning of life than we realize; and three, the “stage” is just the right size.

(I would be interested to see the context from which this quote was taken. It seems to be one of those quotes that could go either way, either used by people to demean religion and believers, or used to open the door beyond ones preceived ideas and notions. The latter would be a moment of grace if accepted.)

A hymn also known as Adoro Te Devote:

Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore,
Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more,
See, Lord, at Thy service low lies here a heart
Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art.

Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived:
How says trusty hearing? that shall be believed;
What God’s Son has told me, take for truth I do;
Truth Himself speaks truly or there’s nothing true.

On the cross Thy godhead made no sign to men,
Here Thy very manhood steals from human ken:
Both are my confession, both are my belief,
And I pray the prayer of the dying thief.

I am not like Thomas, wounds I cannot see,
But can plainly call thee Lord and God as he;
Let me to a deeper faith daily nearer move,
Daily make me harder hope and dearer love.

O thou our reminder of Christ crucified,
Living Bread, the life of us for whom he died,
Lend this life to me then: feed and feast my mind,
There be thou the sweetness man was meant to find.

Bring the tender tale true of the Pelican;
Bathe me, Jesu Lord, in what Thy bosom ran
Blood whereof a single drop has power to win
All the world forgiveness of its world of sin.

Jesu, whom I look at shrouded here below,
I beseech thee send me what I thirst for so,
Some day to gaze on thee face to face in light
And be blest for ever with Thy glory’s sight. Amen.

— Saint Thomas Aquinas, translated by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Do we dare say it, “it’s all for you”?

The winters marked the Earth
Its floor with frozen glass
You slip into my arms
And you quickly correct yourself

Your freezing speech bubbles
Seem to hold your words aloft
I want the smoky clouds of laughter
To swim about me forever more

I will race you to the waterside
And from the edge of Ireland shout out loud
So they could hear it in America
It’s all for you

The shells crack under our shoes
Like punctuation points
The planets bend between us
A hundred million suns and stars

The sea filled in this silence
Before you said those words
And now even in the darkness
I can see how happy you are

I will race you to the waterside
And from the edge of Ireland shout out loud
So they could hear it in a America
It’s all for you

It’s all for you (x4)

— Snow Patrol, “The Planets Between Us” (sound clip, video)

Many beautiful love songs apply to God and us as much as for two people in love. After all, God is love. That makes Him a lover too. This song in particular is heart-warmingly haunting. Not only the tone of the music, but especially the rising crescendo at the ending. It seems almost too good to be true.

Contemporary skeptics about God or even about humanity would say that it is presumptuous to say that “It’s all for you”, implying that this world, this universe was made just for us humans. In a way, it is. But it is not just about us; it’s about everything, all of creation is for all of creation. Also, if it is for us, then we have a responsibility to it, and to God the Giver of the gift.

Parts of this song remind me of a poem by St. Francis of Assisi, “God Too Would Kneel Down”, where God would travel around the world and be with people who are weeping, laughing, and worshiping. Here, God is singing to me, how my laughter is important to Him, how my presence is important to Him. I am reminded of the old father in the Lost Son parable (aka the Prodigal Son) running to meet his lost son, but this time, God is racing with me to the edge of the land, to shout across the ocean about His love for me. And I’m going to shout my love for God.

Then the lyrics kind of juxtapose themselves. Is it God singing to me, or me singing to God, or both? The silence, “before you said those words”. What words? Whose words? Words of love? Faith? Trust? Hope? Remember, it is both of us expressing these words.

America, a symbol of the modern world, can you hear God’s words? Can you hear mine? Do you dare take responsibility that it might just be all for us? That we all are here for each of us?

“They shall name him Emmanuel, which means ‘God is with us.’” (Matthew 1:23)

For seven years, Movable Type has served me well as the software of choice for blogging my CowPi Journal. I started with version 1.something up to the latest 4.something. I went through all their growing pains, from a free application, to paid, back to free/paid versions, from simple comments and trackbacks to multiblogs and tags. I tweaked it with a few plugins along with a few of my own modifications. Unfortunately, Movable Type is based on Perl, and frankly, Perl does not play nicely with PHP. I know PHP; I don’t know Perl.

I had been exploiting a nice little bug in PHP4 that allowed me to call cgi scripts from within PHP and display the results. It worked beautifully, especially for keeping search url’s nice and pretty. But my hosting service just upgraded to PHP5, thus eliminating the bug. Oh well. I knew it would happen one day.

So, goodbye Movable Type and static pages. I’ll miss you. Hello WordPress with dynamic everything.

Please bear with the changes on this website while I tweak the theme and links and such. In the transition, I managed to keep all the tags but lost the Saint-of-the-Day for each entry. Apologies for any broken links and feeds. Spring cleaning too.