My girlfriend and I were discussing the other day what shapes our preferences for aesthetics, whether it be in fashion, art, architecture, music, furniture, etc.  I expressed my frustration with people who reject the mainstream by virtue of it being mainstream and by doing so join an alternative anti-mainstream, yet another mainstream just the same.  It saddens me how, in an effort to be non-conformist, people will actively avoid popular trendy things that are quite possibly beautiful, but simply because they are trendy, they are somehow beneath them.  We began talking about the issue because I just recently got a record player and am really excited about listening to all those old recordings with that relatively base technology that somehow makes the music seem more raw, natural, authentic and real; dare I say, it seems more meaningful somehow.  I recognize that my desire for a record player comes at a time when record players are en vogue, much like many other things that are “vintage”.  I will not apologize for liking something at about the same time it becomes trendy; rather I can thank the trend-setters for reminding me of something that has been cool and valuable all along.  But while the raw quality of the music one gets from an LP of Nick Drake might be motivation enough, there is another reason I like records so much: they demand your time.

In our world of mp3 players, CDs, iTunes/iPods/iPhones/ithinki’mgonnavomitmedias, we have become insatiably obsessed with the symbol FF>>.  Jump to track 3 and switch the CD.  Scroll through your playlist and find exactly what you want and move on.  Don’t get me wrong, this certainly has its place.  But records require that we invest in the experience.  The goal isn’t to hear that one song you love to rock air guitar to in the car (which I do, and certainly don’t want to discourage others from doing, but that’s not the point).  Rather, the goal in listening to a record is to embark upon a lyrical journey from track 1 through 12, complete with the 3-second breaks of silence punctuated by those scratchy commas that remind you you’re listening to an LP while at the same time inviting you to prepare for the next step in your musical journey.

MP-3 players have their value, CD players too.  And jumping to your favorite track is at times useful and prudent.   There is even a time and place for sweet mixes of unrelated songs weaved into an (un)intentional musical tapestry.  But the fact remains: there’s nothing like sitting down with a beer, throwing on an old record and taking in the whole experience from the moment the needle scratches the surface to the moment you’re once again left with that interminable scratchy silence.

In commemoration of our (Philadelphia’s) first snow of the season, here is a poem I wrote a few years ago called Baptism by Snow:

Crystalline spectra of liquid light and life
Descend upon a lifeless but wanting face
Like messengers of so sweet a song,
Reminding with each kiss of icy breath
That the wintry dust promises a new day
And a new me.

~Michael P. Van Gilst

Ok, so I admit I suck at blogging.  I don’t think I’d have enough time even if I wasn’t in school to get achieve what I was hoping to accomplish on this blog.  That much introspection is just too daunting.  Besides, it doesn’t make sense to force profundity and I’m a firm believer in not writing anything that doesn’t deserve the immortality of written word.  But yes, one may disagree with me as to what exactly deserves that immortality — my definition is often quite broad!

Now most people around this time of year start asking that question, “What am I thankful for?”  And certainly that is a decent enough question; it is a fundamentally good thing to be thankful.  But it is also inescapably self-centered: invariably what we are thankful for generally consists of those things that benefit us.  And our nation has done an excellent job at supplanting pure and sincere thankfulness by creating Black Friday, a false capitalistic holiday to immediately follow Thanksgiving, assuming the guise of being others-centered.  “What?  I’m not being selfish.  I’m waking up at 2 a.m. to buy presents for other people.  How is that selfish?”

Well, the goal of such soporific asceticism is to save yourself some money in your attempt at materialistically proving to your loved ones that you care about them.  Yeah, I know, that’s a little harsh.  Let me be clear: I am not against buying presents as a way of showing love. And to all my friends who were out shopping this morning, I hope this doesn’t sound like a moral condemnation, I too was seriously considering camping out at Walmart to get my 32-in LCD TV for $250!!  It’s just that I have been increasingly concerned by the way we jump right from being conscientiously thankful one day, to relegating that pursuit to memory as we train our materialistic gaze upon December 25th.  So my question is this: if you can be conscientiously thankful one day out of the year, what things keep you from being conscientiously thankful the other 364 days?

I asked myself that question, because I realized I was just as guilty of it as I’m sure most of us are.  And here is what I came up with: fear, worry, uncertainty, pride, anger, discontent, cowardice, pain, fatigue, and gluttony (I’m sure the list could continue).  There is one thing that is common among all these things: idolatry.  Let me define “idolatry” as anything that illegitimately commands our obsessive gaze and worship.  It is an insidious thing, and often takes the form of innocuous and even admirable things.  Even serving others can be idolatrous if the motive is ill-directed.  It is profoundly a expression of the heart.  The only path to authentic thankfulness (and authentic existence) every day of my life is to daily allow the Lord to remain enthroned over my life.  Once I let other things take the throne, I open the floodgates to every seed of malcontent known to man.  Ironically, it is only by realizing my servitude that I can be thankful toward the One I serve.  It is not possible to have nothing on that throne.  It will either be the true Lord, or an impostor.  May the true Lord reign in your life and mine during this Advent season and every day of our lives.

Perhaps this isn’t the cheeriest of subjects about which I could reinstate my blog, but it is, without doubt, the most universally applicable.  Viktor Frankl, John Donne, Qoheleth (the writer of Ecclesiastes), and Randy Pausch (the late author of “The Last Lecture”) — What do these men have in common?  They all confronted head-on the most ultimate of subjects: death.  Each man highlights a different aspect of death and gives it a color that only extensive personal experience can do.  Being a nurse-in-training, going to class or clinical is a daily reminder of that which shall one day claim us all.  But it is my desire to show that this is not an exercise in futility; indeed thinking clearly about death serves to affirm its antithesis.

We don’t like to think about death.  In the United States, so much of our popular culture seems hell-bent on ignoring this inevitability, as if by doing so one could make his present circumstances more bearable; as if the only path to happiness were paved in whatever can distract us from that ultimate destination.  On the other hand, focusing too much on death can lead to a denial of the present and philosophical fatalism.  I’m reminded of the classic conversation between Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in “When Harry Met Sally”:

Harry: …Do you think about death?

Sally: Yes.

Harry: Sure you do, a fleeting thought that drifts in and out of the transom of your mind.  I spend hours, I spend days –

Sally:  — and you think this makes you a better person?

Harry: Look, when the shit comes down, I’m gonna be ready, and you’re not.  That’s all I’m saying.

Sally:  And in the meantime you’re going to ruin your whole life waiting for it.

True.  We find it easy to see this one extreme: ruining one’s life by obsessing about death.  But too often we ignore the other extreme: ruining one’s life by ignoring it.  This is the truth Frankl, Donne, Qoheleth and Pausch were grappling with.  If I were to try to incorporate the thoughts of all these men in a single blog, I don’t think even I would want to read it, so let me go in phases.

First I want to look at some thoughts of Viktor Frankl, a psychotherapist in the Vienna tradition of Freud and Adler, but much less obsessed with his mother.  He developed his theories of psychotherapy as a prisoner in German concentration camps as he observed who survived those atrocities, those who didn’t, and why.

Then I’ll be looking at the Holy Sonnets of John Donne — make no mistake, this will be no scholarly endeavor.  I intend to only extrapolate what speaks to me and I’ll probably comment on the movie “Wit” with Emma Thompson which utilizes Donne’s poetry as a platform from which to portray a woman’s bout with ovarian cancer.

Thirdly I hope to do justice to Qoheleth, the mysterious author of Ecclesiastes…no small task.  And finally I’d like to take a modern look at death from the point of view of Randy Pausch, author of “The Last Lecture” who, in light of his diagnosis of terminal cancer (with 3-4 months to live), wrote a book of what he considered to be life’s greatest lessons.

I hope you’ll stay tuned for these installments.  Being a full-time student it may take some time to get these out; still none are meant to be exhaustive and all I hope will spawn positive discussion and introspection.

For anyone who used to read my blogs back in 2007 (when I last posted) and who for some serendipitous reason is checking my blog now, much has happened in the last 2 years.  I graduated Westminster with a Masters in Religion and have subsequently begun another degree, a 2nd bachelors in nursing at Villanova University.  I claim this will be my last degree for a while, and indeed I don’t think the American Education Service will be willing to fund any more of my academic endeavors until I pay them back for the last 5 years!  To some it may seem I’m merely delaying the inevitable with all this study; but I am convinced it will pay a return ten-fold when all is said and done.  I am on track to graduate in August of 2010, take the nursing boards that September and hopefully have a job lined up that will allow me to pay off my loans…or at least fix my Saturn and buy something other than ramen for dinner (I only slightly exaggerate).

This is merely a reintroduction to what will hopefully be a fruitful blogging season.  In it I intend to reflect on life, faith, books, movies, art, medicine, and anything else that might be tinkering around in my noggin.  I do not expect it to be exceptionally profound, but I do hope it will be received as profoundly sincere.  And so begins a new chapter in the life of this blog, a new path in my (in our) endeavor to constantly be seeking Canaan.

For so long I thought I was the only one in seminary thinking this way, constantly wondering what the point of it all was. I have wondered when and why seminary became the only way one could make a career out of ministry in an established denomination. I have wondered what all these guys and gals (myself included) are really learning if all we do is read about what other people learned by actually living. I have found that theological books in isolation from experience do little or nothing (or worse yet, do damage) for our pursuit of real wisdom and true service to Christ. Hence the distinction between knowledge and wisdom. The brightest people in the world may prove to be dull in wisdom. Likewise, the most promising “theologians” may not have a clue as to how to speak into the lives of normal people unless they’ve learned how their knowledge plays out in real life.

The idea that I was the only one feeling this way was quite disconcerting and I was beginning to wonder what my place would be in the whole equation. Could I really be an integral part of ministry and the academic community if I saw that environment’s limitations as irreparably debilitating (or at least heading in that direction)? Then I found out I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Apart from other students who have expressed concern for the American approach to education in general, I also found allegiance with a more notable fellow, one who (and this shouldn’t surprise us in the least) was an integral part of a theological revolution. He said,

“It is through living, indeed through dying and being damned that one becomes a theologian, not through understanding, reading, or speculation.”

That man was Martin Luther. His words were, as was just about everything at that point in time, reactionary to what he saw to be a mistaken projection of scholasticism in theological education. And while I’d personally love to use that quote to try to get out of my assigned reading, I believe there is something much more important on the fundamental level that Luther is getting at. I can conceive of a very well-read individual who has absolutely no life experience, no practical outcroppings of his knowledge. In my mind, this man has little or nothing to contribute and I would be very wary to accept anything he had to say. On the flip side, I can conceive of an individual well-versed in the ways of the world yet with no desire to search God’s Word or be challenged in his mind. This man, likewise, has little to offer since his wisdom is not grounded. God’s Word, however, calls us to do both. Nowhere in it does it say, “Be ye therefore satisfied with knowing as much as possible and keeping it to yourself.” Nor does it say, “Blessed art thou who doesn’t waste his time studying or increasing in knowledge but interacts with people a lot.” That’s because everywhere you see a call to increased knowledge, you see a complementary call to work it out practically. Each is dead without the other. Somewhat ironically, even Luther’s quote is based on events that could not have happened had Luther not been VERY well-read. The Reformation may have been spawned by an academic reaction to scholasticism, but what fueled the fire was Luther’s (and others) refusal to allow faith to be relegated to an academic exercise. It was life and death for these men. What have we let our faith become?

What I think Luther meant was that all his education, all his reading and knowledge meant relatively little until it was placed in the realm of life and death. Only then can you really know what it means, for example, when Paul says, “For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” Only then can you really know what it means to love your neighbor as yourself. Only then does Christ’s commands to feed the hungry and minister to the widows and orphans become lenses through which the whole Gospel is viewed. Only through being persecuted can we really understand “Blessed are you when people persecute you because of me.” How can we know what that means just by reading it or by reading what others say about it? The heart of the Gospel is rooted in knowledge, but it blooms through experience, and each is useless without the other.

So, I thought I might give whatever reader base I have left a little glimpse into the mundane thought life of Mike Van Gilst. This is a good example of the kind of stuff I ponder throughout the day, particularly when I’m waiting for my roomate to get out of the shower so I can use it.

Why is it that 12 o’clock noon is “p.m.” and 12 o’clock midnight is “a.m.”? It would seem to me that it should be the exact opposite. If 1-11 are all members of a.m., for example, why is it that 12 jumps to p.m.? It seems clear to me that 12 isn’t the beginning of anything new, but rather a continuation of the old, which would imply that 12 noon should remain with the a.m. crowd. Even though it is still the 12th hour of the day, if we call it p.m., in actuality it is the 1st hour of the afternoon, so it really should be called “0 noon” (unless we go by those misfits who use military time). So I propose that we start a revolution, that we rid ourselves of all our misleading and fact-distorting clocks and watches to replace them with timepieces that tell the truth. I propose one of two possibilities: 1 – we start calling 12 noon “a.m.” and 12 midnight “p.m.”, or 2 – we get rid of the number 12 on our clocks altogether and replace it with “0 hour” (“half past 0″, “0:15″, “I’ll meet you at 5 of 0″, etc). If you ask me, it is time for a change (get it?).

What does it say about me that I’m a more fruitful blogger during finals than any other time of the year? I’d like to say it’s because right now my mind is super fertile soil for knowledge and learning, but you’d probably all see right through that. The real factor, I think, is an unparalleled committment to avoiding the inevitable. It’s what allows me to squander 7.5 hours of potential study time in any given day. So this post is yet another attempt at convincing myself that AP213 doesn’t really exist, that the readings for Theology and Secular Psych were given in jest, and that two weeks from now all the professors will stand in front of us and yell, “GOTCHA!”

But anyway, I saw this news story on foxnews.com (see the story on its original page here), and have posted it below for your amusement -
Diana Duyser will never forget the day the Virgin Mary appeared before her on a grilled cheese sandwich … because she now has a tattoo of the scene. The Florida woman sold the sandwich in 2004 for $28,000, but on Friday, she had her Virgin Mary of the Grilled Cheese tattooed on her chest, WPLG-TV reports.

“We all believe in certain things, OK, and this is what I believe in and this is what I want near and close to my heart and she’ll be there — forever,” Duyser told the station. The holy image appeared on a sandwich that Duyser whipped up nearly 13 years ago.

“It’s Publix bread and Land O’Lakes cheese — yellow, American — so you cook that without any butter or oil and that’s what happened,” she said. “I went to take a bite and she’s looking back at me.”

She kept it for a decade in a clear plastic box, where miraculously, it didn’t mold. Then, in 2004, she sold it in an eBay auction to a gambling Web site, Goldenpalace.com. The site paid for Duyser’s new $1,000 tattoo. They even trotted out the sandwich, in a bullet resistant box, to Miami Ink Tattoo Studio in South Beach, Fla.

Not everybody was so convinced that the still-mold-free image on the toasted bread was that of the Mother of God.

“I think it looks a little like Janet Jackson, a little like Michelle Pfieffer,” said Luis Hernandez, adding “I don’t see the Virgin Mary in there, no.”

Now certain grasps at faith I can at least comprehend. But why, WHY, do people find it so easy to believe in that which is exceedingly more absurd than the actual truth!? (and yes, I was intimating that the Truth can seem a little absurd sometimes!). Short answer would be that this kind of faith requires no personal responsibility, no change on the part of the individual. They can go on holding their grilled cheese close to their heart, getting grease stains all over their shirt in the name of God.  I mean, do we even know if Mary liked cheese???  Kudos, good saint, you have a greater “faith” than I!

WOW! I didn’t mean to delay this long in posting this 2nd part! Sorry ’bout that y’all. I actually wrote this a time ago, I don’t even remember what it says. I trust I still agree, but if it’s heresy, it’s just because of the errors of my youth…a month ago.

Due to the abnormally lengthy exegesis of the original post (at least abnormally lengthy for me!), I decided to split this into two; the first being the heady exegetical crap, and the second being my personal reflections on it. I do realize that I’ve titled this post “Me, Myself, and I-saiah 48″: scroll down to see the first post). So here’s where the Me part comes in.

This passage forces me to ask myself What happens when afflictions come? Do I remember that God has said, “Don’t be surprised when the fiery trial comes upon you, as if something strange were happening to you” (1 Peter 4:12)? Hmmm…now I don’t burn sacrifices to other gods or clothe myself in sackcloth or do any kind of strange dance rituals…at least not literally (my roommates might tell you I do dance, but there is nothing religious in this exercise…and nobody is supposed to see; I just can’t resist the hypnotic beats of Bananarama…and Mr. Mister…“κύριε ἐλέησον in the darkness of the niiiiight!”).

But I do find I seek solace in my gods and not in my God. I seek pleasure in the temporary things whether they be food, clothing, movies or anything from Target. I sacrifice money to these gods and I clothe myself in their ritualistic garb (Guess jeans, Polo shirt, etc.). I bitch and moan as if something indeed strange were happening to me, as if I were the only one in the world being afflicted (see my previous post “When the World Shrinks”), as if God had it in for me. In these moments I feel as if I’m being utterly destroyed, but of course I’m not: it’s this furnace of afflictions refining me. Then again, there is a sense of destruction involved in refining. Just as what is refined is never the same afterwards as it was before (having undergone a deconstruction-reconstruction), so it is with sanctification: it is progressive, and lessons build upon lessons, each time requiring that we must die to the self a little more. And I’m convinced that process never gets any less painful, although hopefully we grow in our peace and understanding of the pain.

So each time you go through a period like this, remember Isaiah 48: God is showing you something new, and He knows that you probably won’t understand the new things yet, or the means in which you must learn them…it is precisely that you don’t understand them that you have to go through refining. But don’t forget the prophecies of the past and how they worked out for your deliverance. Those past trials in and of themselves were blessings because through them God will remind you today or 30 years from now of who He is and what love He has for His children that He found it pleasing to enter into an everlasting covenant with us, that His anger might not burn against us.

Just to interject here before I get back to my Isaiah 48 sequel, I was inspired last night by some very fortunate news to post my current favorite people and why they made the list. Stay tuned for future lists…will you be on it???

10.Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant: for continually bringing sunshine and painfully awkward silences into my life.

9.The guy at DSW shoes: for saying my shoes smelled like fire.

8.American News Media: for taking our minds off Iraq for a day by covering ad nauseam a story involving an ignorant radio jockey saying something really stupid.

7.Will Ferrell: for not being afraid of a volatile backlash from a potentially irate ice dancing community.

6.The guy that invented Sudoku: for giving me something to keep me awake while I sit idly by a pool at 5 in the morning.

5.This guy – Nakamatsu: for being a veritable portrayal of determination in the midst of certain defeat.

4.Sanjaya – For the boldness to rock a hairstyle that can only be described as a cross between a cockatiel, a rooster, and a Roman Centurion’s helmet.

3.My family: for a much needed relaxing Easter celebration…despite shooting down my paint-egg war idea.

2.Sam Boyd: no explanation required (and only temporarily usurped from his usual #1 position)

1.Karyn Traphagen: for allaying my fears if only for a short time by postponing the OTI reading midterm…but come now, is Brueggemann really necessary?