impleri

Last night, i wound up going on an all-state retreat for free. My campus minister practically begged me to go on the retreat and that he would foot the $10 for the night. So, i went. In the the worship gatherings, i realized that for many people (myself included) that the worship music isn’t a means of worshipping God, but rather nothing. We learn these songs and sing the songs without considering the words. We have begun to worship the music and not God. When people raise their hands or dance, it is a result of the waxing and waning of the music, not the movement of God. It has become so predictable: fast song, fast song, slow song, prayer, slow song, fast song, prayer, message, slow song (altar call), slow song (more altar call), fast song, prayer, goodbye. And, people get more “spiritually focused” (i.e. they begin kneeling and raising their hands) on the slow songs. i have decided to practice silence during worship. i remained silent for all of the three gatherings…no singing at all. i also remained fairly still (i did stand sometimes) and focused on God and not the songs. Wow, now that was an interesting experience. i think i want to practice contemplative prayer more often.
i did get to know others in my group that i have seen for a year now. It was the first time that i really got to know them and they me.
We also had two optional seminars that i attended. The first one (on Friday night) was entitled, “Apologetics: How Can I Trust the Validity of the Bible.” It dealt with textual criticism. i feel kinda bad because i asked most of the questions and practically steered the conversation. My questions: (1) How early is the first complete (or nearly complete) manuscript we have of the NT? (it was Fourth century) (2) What about the process of translating the NT Greek into modern day English? After all, the German “er hat ein Voegel” literally translates as “he has a bird,” but really means, “he’s crazy.” How can we understand the idioms of a language dead for over a thousand years? (Comparison with other documents. The two “extremes” of translations– word-for-word and thought-for-thought — both have their application and are acceptable in their application, but not necessarily in the other’s.) (3) How can we trust the authenticity of the person of Jesus when compared to religions contemporaneous to Christianity such as Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, and the Egyptian mythology? (All religions are a search for truth and the idea of a resurrected divinity restoring mankind to a lost level of privilege was popular in that region in that time period.) Pretty good i think. Also, the presenter happens to be a PhD student at the seminary in New Orleans and would like to hang out with me and discuss some other things (we spoke for another hour afterwards about Open Theology and Existentialism). Pretty cool.
My other seminar was “Apologetics: Creation vs. Evolution.” The presenter had too much info to get through in the hour, so she wasn’t able to dwell on anything for longer than three syllables. i spoke with her afterwards and enlightened her to the occupation of Teilhard de Chardin (she quoted him as being a “bad” evolutionists)….as he was a Jesuit priest (and the archaeologist who dug up and found the Peking Man). Not as interesting as the other one.
In the 18 hours i was there, i became known as the “guy who asks deep/difficult questions.” i’d hate for them to meet a devout athiest.
In four weeks, My super-really-cool-ultra-wonderful girlfriend comes down. Yay! And, for the record, that secret i’ve been keeping away from her is about to be revealed.