“The Weekend Wanderer” is a weekly curated selection of news, stories, resources, and media on the intersection of faith and culture for you to explore through your weekend. Wander through these links however you like and in any order you like. Disclaimer: I do not necessarily agree with all the views expressed within these articles but have found them thought-provoking.
“Six Things You Probably Did Not Know About Augustine” – Scott Harrower at Words from the Bird: “Augustine is best known for expressing our deep longing for God: ‘You hast made us for yourself, and our hearts are until they come to rest in you’ (Conf. 1.1.1). Beyond this prayer, Augustine had been one of the most loving and influential people in our Christian family tree. Here are six things you might find interesting and helpful for getting to know him better. 1. Augustine navigated a complex cultural heritage and context – Fitting in can be hard. One of Augustine’s life-long problems was that he didn’t know where he belonged, and neither did others. Where do North-African, Christian-pagan, backwater geniuses belong within a massive Roman Empire? Augustine’s mixed cultural background and context made life hard for him throughout his life –even when he was a famed Bishop. No one could decide whose side he was on. He was born into a mixed family in terms of its cultural background, religious practises and beliefs about what made for a good life.”
“Architecture for Humans: Can people live in hope if their homes and places of work do not nurture and celebrate life?” – Norman Wirzba in Plough: “In the concluding lines of ‘The Hell of Treblinka,’ one of the first published essays on the Nazi death camps, Vasily Grossman writes that lovers of humanity must always bear a simple truth in mind: ‘It is possible to demonstrate with nothing more than a pencil that any large construction company with experience in the use of reinforced concrete can, in the course of six months and with a properly organized labor force, construct more than enough chambers to gas the entire population of the earth.’ Construction workers didn’t need much time to build a factory of death. They didn’t need much space either: ‘Ten small chambers – hardly enough space, if properly furnished, to stable a hundred horses – ten such chambers turned out to be enough to kill three million people.’ The architectures of terror, dehumanization, and killing were remarkably easy to build. Several of the characteristics prized by modern technocratic reasoning – precise calculation and control, maximization of yield, and machine efficiency – were put to work in the camps’ design, construction, and operation. Surveying them, Grossman was struck by how much the layout and the buildings followed the principles of any large-scale modern industrial enterprise. It is tempting to dismiss Treblinka as an especially egregious manifestation of the architecture of hell. We shouldn’t….When people are consigned to live and work in farms, apartments, cities, mines, and factories that alienate and brutalize the soul, the sickness becomes endemic.”
“The Future of Christian Spirituality: A Protestant’s Journey Toward a More Unified Faith” – Ruth Haley Barton at Beyond Words: “We are made for more. More of God than we have right now. More peace, more joy, more love. Deeper levels of wisdom and discernment. True transformation and life change. Whether we can fully articulate it or not, on some level we know we’re made for more and we are wired to keep seeking it. The Church was made for more, too, and yet many pastors and parishioners are deeply disillusioned with the church as an institution. They simply do not see it as a safe place for attending to their deepest spiritual longings, so increasing numbers are walking away. In the forward to Glenn Packiam’s book, The Resilient Pastor, David Kinnaman president of the Barna Group, describes a massively shifting landscape. Social norms and perspectives are edging further towards secularism and a growing indifference toward Christianity—particularly among Millennials and Gen Z who find it increasingly irrelevant and even extremist. In addition, there is a growing credibility gap facing pastors and Christian leaders in the face of numerous high-profile scandals and abuses of power that have come to light coupled with the more intimate disappointments many churchgoers have experienced in their own congregations. Add to this the challenges of ministry in a digital age of distraction, shrinking attention spans, and a deeply ingrained consumer mindset regarding everything from cars to churches, and it is hard to see what the future of Christian spirituality might be.”
“The Silent Revival: How silence restores us to ourselves and to Christ” – Aryana Petrosky in Comment: “A silent retreat is like being swallowed by a whale—plucked from the direction you thought you were going, then immersed into untethered, disorienting time. Your fingers trace the gooey rib cage while dark waters slosh on the outside. Insulated and protected, you can hear muffled and softened sounds of the sea. Until unexpectedly the whale heaves and you are spit out on some distant shore. Like other monastic orders, the Community of Grandchamp observes silence as a part of their daily practice. They describe themselves as a monastic community that “brings together sisters from different churches and various countries” for an ecumenical vocation committed to “the path of reconciliation among Christians and within the human family, and to respect the whole of creation.” Other than the Taizé prayer services sung and recited in French at the morning, noon, evening, and compline hours, the sisters carve out silence in the hours between—with an added seriousness toward the “great silence” from the end of compline at 9:00 p.m. until the morning service at 7:15 a.m. the next day. Words are permitted for instructions, meetings, and spiritual counsel; outside of these occasions, silence is tenderly held. Monasteries have adopted silence to varying degrees over the centuries. Some take a near total vow of silence, such as the Carthusian monks; others incorporate it as a gentle disposition toward the world. St. Benedict, who wrote the first rule for monastic community in the sixth century, advised: ‘So important is silence that permission to speak should seldom be granted even to mature disciples, no matter how good or holy or constructive their talk.'”
“Mistaken As the Gardener” – Brian Zahnd at his blog: “‘Mary Magdalene turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know it was Jesus…supposing him to be the gardener.’ (John 20:14,15)
‘On the third day the friends of Christ coming at day-break to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of a gardener God walked again in the garden, not in the cool of the evening, but in the dawn.’ –G.K. Chesterton
The first person to encounter the risen Christ was Mary Magdalene. It happened in a garden. At first Mary thought Jesus was the gardener. A logical mistake. Or a prophetic mistake. Or a beautiful mistake. Or perhaps not a mistake at all. On Good Friday Jesus was buried in a garden. A garden is a place to cultivate and grow living things. An appropriate place for Jesus to be buried. A few days before his crucifixion Jesus had said, ‘Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit’ (John 12:24). On Holy Saturday the Son of God was a holy seed sown in a peaceful garden. On Easter Sunday the garden brought forth the first fruits of resurrection — ‘Jesus Christ declared to be the Son of God by resurrection from the dead’ (Romans 1:4).”
“How Poetry Keeps the Soul Clear: An interview with Christian Wiman” – Josh Jeter interviews Christian Wiman in Ecstatic: “I remember where I was when I first read Christian Wiman. I was an associate at a law firm in San Francisco, in my late 20s, depressed, unhappy with my job and where my life was going. Perhaps in some kind of reaction, I was reading from Christian mystics at the time. In texts from the contemplative church tradition, I was learning that God is not only a proposition to affirm—an abstract statement of belief—but something more immediate. Dogma, as Wiman wrote for Image, could act as ‘the ropes, clips, and toe-spikes whereby one descends into the abyss.’ Wiman was editor of Poetry Magazine for a decade, and his 2008 essay for the American Scholar revealed his recent arrival at faith. He had fallen in love, acknowledged a “faith that had long been latent” in him, then received a diagnosis of an incurable cancer of the blood—in that order. It was beautiful and spoke to something I had experienced but never discussed: it gave language to a season of absence. And this, in turn, consoled me. On the page, Wiman’s work can be stormy, while at times breaking into flashes of surprising peace. Nowhere is this in greater effect than in his newly released book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, which looks unflinchingly at life, love, and Wiman’s 18-year journey with cancer. As Wiman notes in the introduction, ‘To write a book against despair implies an intimate acquaintance with the condition. Otherwise, what would be the point?’ The result is a dizzying book—at alternate points turbulent, psalm-like, revelatory—and altogether strangely uplifting. It is like nothing else I have read. I wanted to check in with Wiman, ten years after we first spoke in an interview for CT, to learn more about his new book. Our interview was conducted by phone and over email.”
Music: “Of the Father’s Love Begotten,” as performed by the Ely Cathedral Choir
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Matthew Erickson 
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