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I don’t know why he is being so generous, but Vern Poythress has posted his fabulous The Shadow of Christ in the Law of Moses online. I’ve read nothing better on Christ in the Old Testament. I’ll tease you with only one brief quotation:

We in the West are not very much at ease with symbolism ourselves. We live in an industrialized society dominated by scientific and technical forms of knowledge. Such knowledge minimizes the play of metaphors and the personal depth dimensions of human living. For many people “real” truth means technological truth, that is, truth swept free of metaphor and symbolism. We meet symbolism mostly in advertising, and such use of symbolism rouses our suspicions and often ends by producing indifference.

I am convinced that God does not share our general cultural aversion to metaphors and symbols.

So am I.

Life in community does not keep the darkness away. To the contrary. It seems that the light that attracted me to L’Arche also made me conscious of the darkness in myself. Jealousy, anger, the feeling of being rejected or neglected, the sense of not truly belonging – all of these emerged in the context of a community striving for a life of forgiveness, reconciliation, and healing. Community life has opened me up to the real spiritual combat: the struggle to keep moving toward the light precisely when the darkness is so real.

Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son

Christian community is the beautiful life to which we are called – yet even among our brothers and sisters we can’t find utopia (at least not on this side of the River). Nouwen’s comment helps to arm us against the disillusionment that could tempt us to reject the community we so desperately need.

The importance of reading, not slight stuff to get through the time, but the best that has been written, forces itself upon me more and more every year I live; it is living in good company, the best company, and people are generally keen enough, or too keen, about doing that, yet they will not do it in the simplest and most innocent manner, by reading.

–Matthew Arnold, from a letter to his sister Frances, when he was approaching 60

I suppose it is inevitable that when a man grows old, or rather when he realizes that he is growing old, he should reflect on his life and how he lived it. Frank Sinatra claimed, at least in song, that he had a few regrets – but, then again, too few to mention. If I fail to mention my own it is not for their scarcity, but for my ignorance of where to begin.

In one of Theodore Dalrymple’s essays he mentions that most people who die in hospitals spend their last hours watching the television. The realization is ghastly – that someone would fade into eternity under the flickering images of American Idol (or Slovak Superstar). And I don’t gasp as someone looking down his long nose because he doesn’t waste his time in front of the Tube – I’ve found my own ways to fritter away the sands of my hourglass.

Just look around and marvel at how we human beings, made in the image of God, squander the brief time we have been given. And don’t mistake me for someone who would argue that every minute must be filled with work, doing something “useful” – I believe we were created for joyful work and rest, creation and recreation. (And I will let you, in the privacy of your own thoughts, ponder what rest and recreation could be called joyful, and that which is mind-numbing, inane, or even dehumanizing.)

In his poetry Matthew Arnold had a painful knack for crafting bitter meditations on the fact that for most of us, our lives fall short of what we had hoped. Consider these lines from “Rugby Chapel”:

What is the course of the life
Of mortal men on the earth?–
Most men eddy about
Here and there–eat and drink,
Chatter and love and hate,
Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, are hurl’d in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving
Nothing; and then they die–
Perish;–and no one asks
Who or what they have been,
More than he asks what waves,
In the moonlit solitudes mild
Of the midmost Ocean, have swell’d,
Foam’d for a moment, and gone.

Teach me, O Lord, to number my days well….

At 768 meters above sea level, Zaruby is the highest peak in the Smaller Carpathian mountains. Our friend Marek planned a hike for several of us on Friday afternoon, and we started out in reasonably warm-ish weather below the castle in the village of Smolenice:

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