david-nathanael-jones

As Prof. Hafemann tells it, he first experienced George Eldon Ladd's thought and personality as he sat through the professor introductions during grad school orientation at Fuller Theological Seminary.

Here it was in the evening period of the hippy movement, all the incoming students sported long hair, threadbare jeans, and tie-dyed shirts with buttons declaring, "Jesus is my high," or "I'm friends with Jesus," or "Jesus Freak."

After all the other professors had rambled or quipped through their introductions, George Ladd, a white haired giant of a man, stands up and walks to the microphone. He looks with deadpan expression out the colorful crowd for a moment, and says, "I've never had a religious experience in my life" [pause], "but I believe in the resurrection."

Beautiful.

Thank you Jon, Ryan and Coye; seeing your typed comments--each kindnesses in their own way--made this corner desk in this little apartment seem less disconnected from other lives. Blogging, with its "hey world, I exist!" form, can so easily become an exercise in futility; you help me escape the ephemeral form and see the solid reality of relationships.

Currently I'm beginningGeorge Eldon Ladd's The Gospel of the Kingdom. Entry point? Consider the Parables, "the Kingdom IS like a tiny seed which becomes a great tree, it IS like the leaven which will one day permiate the entire bowl" (18, emp. mine). Yet, as he is questioned by Pilot concerning his teaching, Jesus emphatically states, "my kingdom IS NOT of this world." Ha! A great set up. I'm excited to see where Dr. Ladd takes me. Anyone want to read it with me and talk about it?

Perhaps I'll post some further quotes a little later.

A light fog currently covers South Hamilton, MA. It's been like that all day, actually. I had to put my books in a bag (I usually just carry them) so that they wouldn't get wet from the tiny droplets of moisture.

Since I know I have at least one reader, and since writing is a good thing, I begin again. One, you better keep your end of the bargin.

3:19 -

3:25 - I just wrote something about writing and erased it. I would erase this but I want to get through this first post as soon as possible.

3:26 - I have a crink in my neck that has lived there (in the left side, just next to my vocal cords) on and off for the past four years. It feels like someone has inserted a closed fist under the left side of my jawbone such that half the fist has actually grown into the flesh of my neck. Right now the fist is angry and tight. It's not always this tight.

3:33 - My son, Andrew; Andrew, my son: he is almost crawling now. He sits gets up on his hands and knees and rocks back and forth. Sometimes he puts a hand or a knee foward, but no consecutive foward movements yet. Its absolutely mindblowing how fast this son of mine is going to grow up into a person who speaks and has feelings, who thinks in the first person and thinks about me as a second person. I will be "Dad"; he will be "me"; another generation in this grand drama of time and space before the Lord, the giver of life.

3:37 - Trying to order this jumbled mind of mine takes time. Come back to the concrete: write. It's threeforty and Sunday; more will come, but not today.

So we've moved. Done gone picked up our stuff and left Wheaton Illinois. After waddeling around from place to place, we plopped down just north of Boston. Now we live on the third floor of building F--the Graham building--in a two bedroom apartment with an eat-in kitchen, hard industrial-style rugs and no ceiling lights. So we set up all the lamps we have and unpacked most of our boxes and now were just trying to realize just what exactly we've done. I'm not sure yet.

Last night I sat in the darkness of my unfamiliar living room and let a little of the crying out; more will come--I feel like my emotions are attached to me like a bungee cord right now, and last night they took their first violent pass through my body and out the other side. They will settle eventually, but it will take a few more punches to the gut.

Mostly, I'm scared. I don't want to mess this whole life of faith thing up--it's just so so easy to do that. So many things inside of me do not hold together very well, and that makes me scared. "My soul waits for God alone. . ." I must keep breathing.

My son is coming soon! That, I know, is good!

There's this idea forming in my head that seems to move toward the answer the nagging question: what am I going to do with my life?

Basically, my idea has to do with trying to implement a form of neo-monasticism in an urban environment sometime within the next ten years. What I mean by "neo-monastic" is this: monastic in the sense of theologically based community living, and not just living in the sense of shared space but living in the sense of producing sufficient surplus to maintain the community itself. So this community would live and work together within some sort of shared space.

In my dream, the community would be a growing and replacating community that seeks specifically to invite the structurally oppressed into its midst--to become a part of the community itself, and to leave equipped to form such a community elsewhere.

I'll have to write more on it later... but I'm trying to get a start on articulating it here.

I sit staring though the silent window out over the frozen paper world outside--buildings, grass, pavement--caught suddenly in perfect articulations of this morning's perfect light. Nothing seems to move; what does move shouldn't be moving; I don't know why.

Four geese fly by in a jagged line. They strain ahead with those funny necks, I look at them. They are gone.

I still see them now that they are gone: frozen in a perfect line in light so brilliant that everything else disappears in white behind them.

And I sit still, reading my own words in to this screen, into this screen, into this screen. . .

I keep waiting for the break-through: tearing paper, burning grass, shattered geese. Please, "while it is called today" remove this frozen heart and teach me how to live in a world where things move (and move strangely); teach me how to want this--for You wanted it. Teach me how to love, to take a risk with motion, to speak into another: to be spoken into.

I always imagine You seeing things as light sees things: still, and by their stillness: set and settled into sleep: and so my heart becomes miserable. I forget the incarnate mind of God which somehow sees all everything unfolding--while You yet incarnate YHWH, YHWH, YHWH.

How much must melt? How much of even this must melt!? (for my heart is always cleaver with deceptions!)

I received word over the weekend that Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary accepted me into their M.Div. Program starting this fall, so it looks like Sarah and I will be packing up our belongings and heading East come May or so. It's been six years since I've lived on the East coast; much has changed since then (in my life--not so much on the East coast), and I'm interested to see how the culture will look from my formed perspective.

Well, that's pretty much all I have to say about that.