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A little music nerdery: 'God of our Fathers' and 'O Canada'
This morning before church I was listening to the organist practice, and while I knew from reading the bulletin ahead of time that the processional was God of our Fathers, when I heard the organ music my brain wanted to run with it instead as O Canada. At the time I was puzzled why, but then when I actually sang the hymn while processing, I realized what it is: the second line of both songs is nearly identical in melody and harmonic progression.
I dug up sheet music for both of them in the same key just to belabor the illustration. Here’s God of our Fathers:
And here’s O Canada:
My music theory is rusty, but in the second line (“Leads forth in beauty all the starry band” and “True patriot love in all of us command”, respectively), they start on the I, hit the iii, and then the V - V/V - V cadence with almost the same melody. The Canadian anthem does sneak a transitional V/iii chord in as some passing snazziness, but on the whole: I will forgive my brain for mentally continuing on “with glowing hearts we see…” rather than “of shining worlds in splendor…”.
Thus endeth the music nerdery.
(“Thanks be to God!”)
Fifth Season 5k
This morning I got back to an event I haven’t participated in for several years: the Fifth Season 5k. This was the 40th anniversary race - every 4th of July in the morning hundreds of runners assemble and compete over either the 5k or 8k distance. It was a hot morning - 78F and humid - but that didn’t keep almost 1000 runners from racing today.
My chip time finish was 25:59, which is a PR for me, and 9th in my age group. (If I were 2 years older I would’ve been first in that age group!) Definitely feel like if it had been cooler I would’ve been able to shave another 30 seconds off that; guess I’ll have to sign up for a fall run and see how it goes. Regardless, it’s a fun event to have this many folks out on a hot holiday morning.
Hey, it's another book club (of sorts)...
Spent 90 minutes tonight on a Zoom call with a (mostly) local “Christophany group” - a collection of 15 or so who are currently discussing The Not-Yet God by Ilia Delio at the (quite reasonable) pace of one chapter per month. The group appears to come from a variety of religious backgrounds, but is united in the goal of communal reflection on the insights of Teilhard de Chardin, Ilia Delio and similar thinkers.
As someone who’s been fascinated by Delio’s work for the past few years, this group is a godsend. Thoroughly enjoyed the discussion, already looking forward to next month.
Bullet Points for a (very warm) Monday Morning
Hey, it’s Monday.
- Spent Sunday afternoon supporting my wife’s cast iron business at a local farmers market. 90F felt like 99F when we set up. Oof.
- Living life on the wild side Monday morning by upgrading my Debian install on my Emby server PC.
- Sunday morning Books & Donuts at church is fun and sometimes surprising; Senior Warden on our Vestry has taken up Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot books at my recommendation.
- Farmers Market yesterday was a dud; shoppers were as put off by the heat as the vendors were. Good dry run for us though, I guess.
- Just signed up for my second race of the summer. Have a 5k coming up on July 4th; added a 10k on Labor Day weekend.
- Having lost a bunch of weight and now getting active this year there’s a renewed sense of physicality that I love - feeling your body tired, sore, healing - feels more alive somehow.
- Planning to attend a conference in Vegas in August for work. That’ll be my first time in Nevada, leaving me with 3 states left unvisited: Vermont, Wyoming, and Hawaii.
- Middle kid is in Hawaii right now. Jealous.
- One of these years I wanna do a road trip across the Nebraska sandhills and get to Wyoming. Have extended family that run a candy shop in Casper. That’s worth a visit.
- And just like that my Debian upgrade is done. Quick and easy and came back up perfectly.
Stay safe and stay cool, friends.
We are slowly becoming the Elders
I loved this thought from Wil Wheaton’s blog yesterday:
A friend of mine observed that we are slowly becoming the Elders, and that’s just really weird. I have been thinking about that, and it turns out there is a lot about that I’m not really ready to embrace, like accepting that people I love, who mean so much to me, are getting older (and elderly) with all that implies. It’s just … it’s really weird. At the same time, it feels really good and … gentle? … to embrace a position in life that allows me to be a kind, patient, supportive, and encouraging person in the world for anyone who needs it.
I’m thinking a lot about how I can talk about things from a place of experience, in a way that younger me would have been able to hear and internalize. I want to be a Helper so much, y’all.
Wil is such a lovely example of someone who has been through Hell, has labored - and continues to labor - at the work of healing, and who recognizes the call to care for the people around him in the ways he was never cared for. I want to become that kind of Elder, too.
If humans hadn't sinned, would Christ have still come?
I love this bit from Ilia Delio in The Not-Yet God, summarizing a thought from Franciscan theologian Duns Scotus:
The reason for the incarnation, then, is not sin but love. Christ is first in God’s intention to love. The incarnation is the unrepeatable, unique, and single defining act of God’s love. Thus, even if sin had not entered the universe through the human person, Christ would have come.
That’s good news, my friends.
Chris Arnade on American vs European values and "the good life"
Highly recommend Chris Arnade’s latest Substack discussion of the legitimate difference in human values between Europe and America and how that plays out in cultural priorities and what we think of as “the good life”.
An excerpt:
There is a genuine comprehension gap between the US and Europe. There really are two different minds with two different understandings of what it means to be a human, and that manifests in different rules, regulations, and priorities, since policy is a result of a society’s cultural preferences….
While the US and Europe share a broad commitment to classical Liberalism, and Democracy, we have very different definitions of the Public Good, which means different views of what we want out of life, and what we consider fulfilling. In broad and simplistic terms, the US emphasizes material wealth, opportunity, and individual liberty while Europe values community health, a shared common good, and a sense of place.
From the European perspective the US has a cult of the individual, and that’s why it has too many guns, obscenely large cars, can’t build a public transportation system, and has dysfunctional public spaces. From the US perspective Europeans are unmotivated unproductive slackers who would rather sip coffee all day than work, and their idea of a shared common good means stealing from the successful to give to the losers.
This difference isn’t simply about things such as tax policy, health care, and worker rights (although those matter), but about how we understand the good life, and how our built environment reflects that.
As with any of Arnade’s posts, the associated photographs really are a must-view to fully appreciate his perspective. Worth reading and subscribing.
My talks at Christ Episcopal Church Adult Forum, May 2025
The past two Sundays I had the opportunity to talk at my church’s Sunday morning Adult Forum. The first Sunday I spent most of an hour just telling my story of growing up in Evangelicalism and eventually leaving it and becoming Episcopal. It’s a long talk, but was good to tell my story and to feel like I finally have enough space and distance from it to start to be able to tell it clearly and fairly.
As I was writing my story for week 1, I had multiple topics that came up where I thought “that’s an important thing about Evangelicalism, and if you didn’t live in it for a while it might not be obvious at all”. So I compiled those into a short list and spent Week 2 talking about them. These topics included:
- Biblicism
- Congregational independence
- Entrepreneurialism
- Gender hierarchy
- Insular cultural environment and the influence of Christian media
- Opposition to Christian Tradition
One of the folks who attended week 1 sent me a link to an Ann Patchett interview with the hope that I’d respond to some comments near the end (starting about 26:20 in the link) where she asks whether what religion you pick really matters at all. It was a perfect final question to respond to and tie off my two weeks of discussion. I won’t give away my answer but I’m happy with where it landed.
State champ!
Super proud of our youngest daughter, Katie, who earlier today won first place for National History Day in the Senior Individual Presentation category at the Iowa state-level competition. To accomplish this she spent months researching her chosen topic and then wrote a 10-minute monologue portraying different historical perspectives on the topic.
It was a timely topic: “Watergate: Presidential Right to Confidentiality v. Responsibility for Justice”.
Next up: the national competition at the University of Maryland (just outside Washington, DC) in June.
Freedom from the compulsion to pretend: Mtr. Kelli Joyce on gender traditions and the fruit of the spirit
Continuing from yesterday’s post, I want to excerpt one more wonderful section from the conversation between Fr. David W. Johnston and Mtr. Kelli Joyce. This time it’s about ’traditional masculinity’, freedom in Christ, human flourishing, and the Fruit of the Spirit. (Emphasis throughout is mine.)
Johnston: And so what I hear you saying is that for for any any young men who might be watching this, if you want to if you want to go have a beer with your friends and tell jokes, do it unto the glory of God, right?
Joyce: Absolutely. I mean, this is the thing. Jokes are great. Cruelty is not. You can do unfunny cruelty and you can do uncruel jokes, right? A cold one with the bros? Go for it.
Johnston: With any of those things that are traditionally masculine or feminine, like you know, if you like working out or mixed martial arts, I mean, yeah, that’s fine. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, self-control.
Joyce: No one thing can get a seal of approval as “that’s good” or “that’s bad”. That’s the whole point of the freedom in Christ: I can’t tell you for sure if beer and jokes are fine because it might be and might not be depending on how you’re doing it, who you’re doing it with, what your relationship to alcohol is, you know, these kinds of things. Same with mixed martial arts or whatever. If you are doing it from a place that is compatible with those fruits of the spirit, do it to the glory of God. And if you’re doing it in some way that is making you less joyful or making you afraid or making you feel insecure, right, then those are things to look at, not because mixed martial arts is bad, right? But because God wants you to have abundant life.
Johnston: From my point of view as somebody who in a lot of ways embodies a lot of very stereotypical uh, masculine traits, still remember like wondering like, well, is there something wrong with me? Cuz I could not care less about cars. I have a son who’s like, “Oh, that’s a cool car.” And I’m like so bored. I’m like, “My favorite car is affordable, predictable, good gas mileage, public transportation.”
…What I see that’s getting coded or trying to Trojan horse into some of that “this is traditional masculinity” is a pass for things that are not the fruit of the spirit. For cruelty, demeaning people, pride, looking at women with lust, you know objects to puff up male pride… I think Christianity does offer us a way of life like you’re talking about, that abundant life. And so that if one wants to embrace very traditional masculinity or femininity, that is okay. And Jesus has shown us what that looks like. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control.
Joyce: I think that sometimes there is slippage between conversations about what kind of person one may be, is allowed to be, and what kind of person one must be. I think for me the important thing is of course there’s room to like cars, but there’s room to not like cars. The thing that is important is not that one deny interests because they’re masculine or pretend to have them because they’re masculine. Right? Like, what if we could be free of feeling compulsion to pretend in either direction, right? That we don’t like what we do, that we do like what we don’t. What if we were our whole, full, authentic selves, exactly as we were created to be, in relationship, but not competing and not trying to become someone over and against somebody else, just being who we are?