St. Jude Marathon

In just three days I will be running the St. Jude Marathon in Memphis in an effort to raise funds for the life-saving work of the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital there. Thankfully, even as my training is winding down, my fundraising is winding down too. I have now crossed the 98% threshold in reaching my targeted goal. On Saturday, as I run, I will do so with the support of lots and lots of dear friends cheering me on--if not in person, certainly in spirit.

You too can still join this noble throng. Why not push me over the 100% mark? Just go to my st. jude sponsor site and pledge right online. You can also follow my daily training and progress at my run blog.

Medieval Humility

Gregory the Great served as the pastor of the city church in Rome from 590-604. Tomorrow morning I will be lecturing on this remarkable man and his remarkable heritage. He was of vital importance in the development of Christendom precisely because he forged the Roman bishop’s see into the formidable force of the Medieval papacy--indeed, before Gregory the pastors there were not yet called “popes” nor did their jurisdiction extend much beyond the city itself. There is much to admire in this man. And perhaps just as much to disdain. Like all men, he was a tangle of complexity and his legacy is not so easily summarized as most historians suppose.

Though I have studied his life and legacy a good bit in the past (at least in survey), I had never read much of his writing. In fact, he left behind a substantial and varied literary heritage. His most ambitious work and one of the most popular works of Scriptural exegesis during the Medieval Age was the Moralia in Job. A vast and sprawling commentary on the book of Job in 35 books, it runs to over half a million words. The piety and humility of the work is quite profound--as this sample from the highly confessional last page of the text illustrates:

Now that I have finished this work, I see that I must return to myself. For our mind is much fragmented and scattered beyond itself, even when it tries to speak rightly. While we think of words and how to bring them out, those very words diminish the soul's integrity by plundering it from inside. So I must return from the forum of speech to the senate house of the heart, to call together the thoughts of the mind for a kind of council to deliberate how best I may watch over myself, to see to it that in my heart I speak no heedless evil nor speak poorly any good. For the good is well spoken when the speaker seeks with his words to please only the one from whom he has received the good he has. And indeed even if I do not find for sure that have spoken any evil, still I will not claim that I have spoken no evil at all.

But if I have received some good from God and spoken it, I freely admit that I have spoken it less well than I should (through my own fault, to be sure). For when I turn inward to myself, pushing aside the leafy verbiage, pushing aside the branching arguments, and examine my intentions at the very root, I know it really was my intention to please God, but some little appetite for the praise of men crept in, I know not how, and intruded on my simple desire to please God. And when later, too much later, I realize this, I find that I have in fact done other than what I know I set out to do.

It is often thus, that when we begin with good intentions in the eyes of God, a secret tagalong yen for the praise of our fellow men comes along, taking hold of our intentions from the side of the road. We take food, for example, out of necessity, but while we are eating, a gluttonous spirit creeps in and we begin to take delight in the eating for its own sake; so often it happens that what began as nourishment to protect our health ends by becoming a pretext for our pleasures. We must admit therefore that our intention, which seeks to please God alone, is sometimes treacherously accompanied by a less-righteous intention that seeks to please other men by exploiting the gifts of God. But if we are examined strictly by God in these matters, what refuge will remain in the midst of all this? For we see that our evil is always evil pure and simple, but the good that we think we have cannot be really good, pure and simple.

But I think it worthwhile for me to reveal unhesitatingly here to the ears of my brothers everything I secretly revile in myself. As commentator, I have not hidden what I felt, and as confessor, I have not hidden what I suffer. In my commentary I reveal the gifts of God, and in my confession I uncover my wounds. In this vast human race there are always little ones who need to be instructed by my words, and there are always great ones who can take pity on my weakness once they know of it: thus with commentary and confession I offer my help to some of my brethren (as much as I can), and I seek the help of others. To the first I speak to explain what they should do, to the others I open my heart to admit what they should forgive. I have not withheld medicine from the ones, but I have not hidden my wounds and lacerations from the others.

So I ask that whoever reads this should pour out the consolation of prayer before the strict judge for me, so that he may wash away with tears every sordid thing he finds in me. When I balance the power of my commentary and the power of prayer, I see that my reader will have more than paid me back if for what he hears from me, he offers his tears for me.

Sobering insights indeed for ministry, for writing, for life.

Where the Girls Aren't

A UN agency contract researcher says the prevalence of abortion and infanticide targeting girls has caused a critical global gender imbalance--with a disparity of more than 200 million worldwide. According to his report, delivered to international health officials this past week, the girls are “missing” because of a practice he calls “gendercide.”

Swiss Ambassador Theodor Winkler, director of the Geneva Center for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, said the number of women who die because of gender-related violence, deprivation, and discrimination is larger than the casualty toll in all the wars of the 20th century combined. The deeply rooted phenomenon of violence against women is “one of the great crimes of humanity,” he asserted.

The study he directed, a 335-page global investigation by 60 authors titled Women in an Insecure World, shows that sex-selection abortions and infanticides are the primary cause of this gross imbalance, which has also resulted in increasing problems with child abuse, sibling violence, spousal exploitation, and sex trafficking. “We are confronted with the slaughter of Eve, a systematic gendercide of tragic proportions.”

“There are dozens of ways women come to a grisly end,” Winkler argued. “Obviously, human rights and the legal protection of women is of crucial importance but it is only one component. There is also a cultural change that must operate… It starts in the womb. There are societies where male births are preferred, particularly if the number of births are limited. That's where abortion for gender reasons starts,” he said.

According to Winkler’s report, now being distributed to governments, academic institutions, and field health officials around the world, UN figures, World Heath Organization research, and government reports unanimously demonstrate that personal and family violence against women is among the leading causes of premature death internationally. “Abortion is now both a moral issue and a health issue--but in quite the opposite manner that abortion advocates have long argued.”

Marathon Countdown

I'm getting close to my goal. There are just 7 days to go before I attempt to run the full 26.2 miles at the Memphis St. Jude Marathon! I've got just one more long training run before I begin a full taper this next week. You can follow my daily preparation and progress at my run blog. I'm getting close to my fundraising goal as well. I am running to benefit the vital cancer research efforts at the remarkable St. Jude Children's Hospital. I've passed the 85% mark. You can help me get over the top. Visit my st. jude sponsor site and pledge right online.

Thanksgiving Newsletter

As you celebrate Thanksgiving with family and friends, we too have a lot to be thankful for and wanted to share it with you! Click here to read our King's Meadow Thanksgiving Newsletter.

St. Clement's Day

Today is St. Clement’s Day--celebrated through the centuries in Christian communities as the threshold to the Advent season and the first of the festive Holy Days (or holidays) that mark the last five weeks of each calendar year.

The third successor to Peter as the pastor of early church in Rome--after Linus and Cletus--Clement (c. 100 AD) was one of the greatest stalwarts of the Patristic Age. His letters, sermons, and commentaries remain one of the best testimonies of the dynamism of the fledgling Christian witness to the world. A constant encouragement to others, he was responsible for the establishment of at least seventy-five churches. His martyrdom apparently occurred on November 23 and as a result, believers have long remembered him on this day.

Celebrated as the first day of winter in many Christian lands, St. Clement's Day has been marked by community or guild suppers--where friends, families, neighbors, and co-workers gather to sing, to roast apples, and to offer mutual encouragement in the faith. So, celebrate this day before Thanksgiving, in accord with Clement's legacy, with a renewed commitment to love well and live well to the glory of Christ.

St. Clement's Day Rhyme

Like all nursery rhymes, the famous St. Clement’s Day Rhyme or the Oranges and Lemons Rhyme is rich in Medieval history:

Gay go up and gay go down,
To ring the bells of London Town.
"Oranges and lemons," say the Bells of St. Clements;
"Bullseyes and targets," say the Bells of St. Margaret's;
"Brickbats and tiles," say the Bells of St. Giles;
"Halfpence and farthings," say the Bells of St. Martin's;
"Pancakes and fritters," say the Bells of St. Peter's;
"Two sticks and an apple," say the Bells of Whitechapel;
"Maids in white aprons," say the Bells at St. Katherine's;
"Pokers and tongs," say the Bells of St. John's;
"Kettles and pans," say the Bells of St. Anne's;
"Old father baldpate," say the slow Bells of Aldgate;
"You owe me ten shillings," say the Bells of St. Helen's;
"When will you pay me?" say the Bells of Old Bailey;
"When I grow rich," say the Bells of Shoreditch;
"Pray when will that be?" say the Bells of Stepney;
"I do not know," say the Great Bells of Bow;
Gay go up and gay go down,
To ring the bells of London Town.

In a sense this wonderful nursery rhyme is an imaginary tour of the old city of London--before the Great Fire of 1666--recounting the predominant trade, guild, and lore of the neighborhoods surrounding each of the churches (with their bell towers). So for instance, St. Clement’s church was in Eastcheap where citrus fruit was unloaded at the nearby warves while St. Margaret’s on Lothbury Street was near an archery range, St. Giles at the Cripplegate Barbican was the center of the building trade, and St. Katherine Cree’s on Leadenhill Street was the site of the Leadenhill marketplace, etc. Who’d have ever thought that the sing-song chants of children through the ages would be so redolent in meaning?

Marathon Countdown

Just 9 days to go! For better or for worse, I'm starting my tapered training in the final run up to the St. Jude Marathon in Memphis. Follow my daily preparation and progress at my run blog. And remember that you still have time to support my run. Visit my st. jude sponsor site and pledge right online. I'm getting close to my goal of $2,500 for cancer research and patient care at the remarkable St. Jude Children's Hospital.

C.S. Lewis

Long before the bane of television invaded our every waking moment C.S. Lewis commented that while most people in modern industrial cultures are at least marginally able to read, they just don't. In his wise and wonderful book An Experiment in Criticism he said, “The majority, though they are sometimes frequent readers, do not set much store by reading. They turn to it as a last resource. They abandon it with alacrity as soon as any alternative pastime turns up. It is kept for railway journeys, illnesses, odd moments of enforced solitude, or for the process called reading oneself to sleep. They sometimes combine it with desultory conversation; often, with listening to the radio. But literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention. When they are denied such attentive and undisturbed reading even for a few days they feel impoverished.”

Lewis went further admitting that there is a profound puzzlement on the part of the mass of the citizenry over the tastes and habits of the literate. “It is pretty clear that the majority,” he wrote, “if they spoke without passion and were fully articulate, would not accuse us of liking the wrong books, but of making such a fuss about any books at all. We treat as a main ingredient in our well-being something which to them is marginal. Hence to say simply that they like one thing and we another is to leave out nearly the whole of the facts.”

C.S. Lewis was the happy heir of a great tradition of books and the literary life. His brilliant writing—in his novels like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The Screwtape Letters, and Perelandra, as well as in his nonfiction like The Four Loves, Surprised by Joy, The Abolition of Man, and A Grief Observed--evidence voracious reading. He was born in 1898 and died on this day in 1963, just seven days shy of his sixty-fifth birthday--the same day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, and thus, largely overlooked. In the years in-between he became renowned as a popular best-selling author, a brilliant English literary scholar and stylist, and one of the foremost apologists for the Christian faith. Recalling his formative childhood years, he wrote, “I am the product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.”

Throughout his life, Lewis celebrated everything that is good and right and true about the literary life. The result was that he was larger than life in virtually every respect. Though he knew that this was little more than a peculiarity in the eyes of most, he did not chafe against it. Instead, he fully embraced it. He explained, “Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, is in a prison. My own eyes are not enough for me. I will see through those of others.” This is because, he argued, “Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”

Marathon Countdown

Just 11 more days until the St. Jude Marathon in Memphis. I'm starting to get excited. I've got all my gear--with all the necessary contingency gloves, shells, hats, and layers just in case race day turns out to be really cold. And I've poured over the race route. I just need one more really good long run to convince me that I'm ready. Follow my daily preparation and progress at my run blog.

And you still have time to sponsor the run. Visit my st. jude sponsor site and pledge right online. I'm getting close to my goal of $2,500 for cancer research and patient care at the remarkable St. Jude Children's Hospital.