December 8, 2008
A quote from Wikipidia (pardon the language). As Megan Nix recently pointed out in her blog, The Nixionary, someone bothered to log this:
piss and shit in some cases may be acceptable among informal (and usually younger) friends (while they almost are never acceptable in formal relationships or public use).
September 9, 2008
Been a long night!
September 9, 2008
It is now 4 am. I sit, sleepless and anxious as our baby slowly (and I do mean slowly) but surely makes her way into this world. The hospital at night is a fascinating place. Creepy, quiet, still. The hallway carpeting here muffles sound like a fresh snowfall. No, I’m not trying to be melodramatic, it just does. This blog frustrates me sometimes. I feel that I need to relate to you all of the spiritual metaphors and realities that are transpiring here tonight. To explain how the birth of a child under the most uninviting of circumstances speaks to the trauma of our age and how just as surely, the new creation that is being born in the midst of it because of Jesus’ resurrection.
There is much that I want to say, but I just can’t articulate it fully. So for now I’ll just say that the good people who run Swedish hospital ought to consider redesigning their waiting rooms in the labor and delivery wing. I’m not sure anything speaks to the fact that our world is still imperfect quite like them.
August 27, 2008
Naturally it would happen when tens of thousands of extra people are crammed into Denver for the Democratic National Convention. Monday evening, we got the call that Carey, the 15-year old girl who is being gracious enough to allow Annie and I to be parents to the little girl growing inside of her, was going into labor. At 4:30 this morning–a full eight and a half hours later–the hospital sent us all home; still no baby. And so we wait. Labor still at hand. Fluries of text messages (a phenomenon I hadn’t fully appreciated until now) have been zipping back and forth through space to anxious friends and family. Perhaps it’s significant that this baby seems to have chosen to arrive the same week as Barak Obama. Perhaps it says something about abortion, or adoption, or hope, or all three. I don’t know. As all of Denver bustles with activity, with messianic goggles pushed full tilt toward the man who may be the next president, I feel like I’m moving in slow motion–gazing at a 15-year old, whom the world–in many ways–forgot amidst the glamour and the spotlights all aglow in Denver.
I don’t know. I just hope traffic lets up when the moment comes…
August 15, 2008
This morning, while procrastinating a talk I’m supposed to give tomorrow, I began staring blankly at my dog who had wandered into the office to lay down beside me. Scout is a mutt whom Annie and I salvaged from eastern Kentucky while running an outdoor program for impoverished kids there four years ago. She was just a pup at the time–a couple of weeks old–and had been found floating down a river in a soggy cardboard box in the days following one of that region’s worst floods in recent memory. (Why we didn’t name her Moses is a question we still lament over.) Stray dogs were in ample supply there and we figured that it would be a more appropriate place to adopt one then back home in Boulder where even the pound seems like a Ramada.
And so Scout became a Powell; but not without a difficult road. She had been badly abused and was an incredible pain in the rear to train. Eventually, she grew to care about what we said to her and after an arduous road, her true personality began to come out. Now, I’m convinced she’s the best dog in the world. I hate overly needy dogs. Those dogs that incessantly beg for attention and petting and like to drool all over ones crotch quite impolitely. (Disclaimer: don’t get me wrong and take that to assume that I’m a cat person because of that taste.) Scout is independent. Does not demand affection. She is part Border Collie so she likes having a job to do and gets restless and whiny when she’s bored. And I can respect that. She does enjoy affection, but only on her own terms–and only after you’ve earned it. Her bark is unfortunate; Scout’s not a terribly big dog (about 45 lbs on a good day), but has the high pitched yelp of a lap dog. No ones perfect I suppose. She gets along well with other dogs, unless they’re jerks, and then she wants nothing to do with them. She’s great with kids and babies, and, I gather, considers it her vocation to sit nearby and guard them against any impending danger. (This is good news considering our newborn–due any day now!)
So how does this relate to the theme of New Creation, which, I suppose is the overall theme of this blog? I’m not sure. I am convinced however, that my dog will have some role in the New Heavens and New Earth. Hopefully, her bark will be less obnoxious there though. Dogs (and animals in general) are not hindered by concupiscence. They have no temptation to do what they ought not–apart, that is, from our own human brokenness, which we afflict them with. It’s good to remind myself that whatever flaws Scout has (separation anxiety, nervousness) were probably inflicted by the creeps who beat her before we met each other. This follows with what St. Paul says in Romans 8 when he declares,
…creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility [brokenness], not of its own will, but by the one who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. (Romans 8:19-21)
In other words, the redemption of the created world (dogs, trees, etc) is dependent on usdoing our job as Christians. Likewise, any discord with the natural world, it seems, (bears, tornadoes, etc.) was likely caused by our (or Adam’s, or whoever’s) sin. This news should both trouble us and give us great hope.
For now though, I’ll content myself just to look at Scout (who is now snoring loudly next to my chair) and remember that she’s counting on me to live out the hope that Christ gives me.
August 14, 2008
The following is a rather scratchy short story I wrote back when I was an undergraduate. I discovered it recently while cleaning out some laptop space. While the writing strikes me as somewhat sophomoric, I found myself pulled into this little outlet which housed the thoughts which were rushing around my head at that point in my life. I include it here for your perusal.
He really was too tall to be sitting at that desk. Inevitably, at some point during his workday, his thoughts drifted to that damn piece of furniture. How his lanky legs always bumped the drawer in the center of it, or if he tried to stretch them out, how the cheap piece of particleboard, which enclosed the front end of the desk would stunt his movement. He often dreamed of kicking that little board out, thus freeing the imprisoned tree trunks that grew off his torso. Deep down he knew he wouldn’t. Deep down he knew he didn’t want to draw any attention to himself. He supposed he was happier to talk to as few people as possible in that laptop infested maze of cubicles he dragged himself to every morning. Happy to be left alone and to leave the other zombies alone too. Make no mistake though, he wasn’t really happy. He would just be happier. But life wasn’t always like this. No, there was a time when he was happy—deliriously happy. His mind strained to try and recreate that period. He was younger then. Maybe just more immature. He had grown up now; he was a man. That childish happiness must have been part of another world, another place entirely.
He pulled his lanky frame out from under the desk and grudgingly pushed himself up slightly overusing the armrests of his chair for support. He was now on his feet—a flexible tower. Both of his legs had fallen slightly asleep in the course of the long hours he had spent staring blankly at his computer screen. This was routine. He would often spend hours at a time, unmoving and unmoved in his little workspace, hypnotizing himself with the glowing screen before him. But now he decided to break the mold (such as it was) and go for a walk. He needed air.
The elevator was crowded. He squeezed his thin body into the nooks and crannies between the other business-suit clad zombies and struggled not to make eye contact. You simply didn’t make eye contact with people on the elevator. Or on the street for that matter; or the subway really; just keep to yourself for Pete sake. The individualistic attitude, which was supposed to free us and make us more powerful as a society, had degenerated into merely making us alone. He was sick of it. Sick and tired. And damn it, it was time to do something about it. He turned his head to stare directly into the eyes of the man next to him. Perhaps out of shock, the young man next to him stared back. For a brief moment, two complete strangers peered into one another’s soul. Then habit kicked in. The young man next to him, clad in the cheap navy suit turned immediately away, embarrassed and surprised by himself at the same time. Their brief communion ended as abruptly as it began. The 20-floor trek downward ended at that moment and the passengers all exited, free to travel through the rest of their days safe in their individual little bubbles.
He found himself on the sidewalk in front of the behemoth glass and steel structure he spent his days in. A little fresh air. Very little. Even though he was outside now, he was suddenly overcome with a feeling of imprisonment. He felt trapped, as though the buildings, the traffic, dreary mid-morning sky were all closing in on him. He needed to sit down. He felt like someone was taking a hatchet to his tree-trunk legs. He realized they could no longer hold him. He sat down right there on the street corner, cars and taxis rushing by in front of him, people scurrying past in back of him. Distantly, he recalled words he had read long ago, was it Ansel Adams? “Migraine from looking up—Nausea from looking down—Total jitters from looking sideways. Noise, sweat, stink, more noise…”
He longed to touch the earth again. From where he sat, he could not see it; he could scarcely remember it. This place was not always his home. No, he had once felt at home in an entirely different world. He would awake in the mountains; he slept with the stars. He could feel his breath and sense his heartbeat. The daily fear that plagued him was non-existent in that place. Or perhaps it was merely a different form of fear—a healthy form. He once feared things that man was created to fear. Weather, wildlife, physical danger when pit against Mother Nature on a mountain, or a river, or a rock face. Man was not created to fear eye contact with another; to fear auto exhaust clogging his lungs; to fear walls of a cubicle closing in around him. “What the hell happened?” he thought, somewhat disjointedly.
This was not his home. This was not his misery. This was not who he was. He didn’t grow up a city boy; he grew up a mountain boy. He remembered back to the day he decided to leave Buena Vista, Colorado. He had gone to school in Boulder and had gotten a taste of life in a bigger town. It wasn’t long though before all his college friends complained constantly about their need to “get out of Boulder.” They argued that there was nothing to do there. Thinking back though, all they ever really did was go out to The Walrus and get drunk. There were others though, folks he knew outside of his usual, cynical circle of friends who seemed genuinely happy. They had something he and his friends did not. They enjoyed the outdoors—as he once did; they talked about art and beauty; they went to (gasp!) church. There was something about them though, that was just out of reach. Maybe it was simply laziness that prevented him from moving outside of himself; outside of his little selfish circle. But that was all in the past. When he graduated and moved back to Buena Vista, it all seemed so small; so backward. His parents seemed so far out of the loop. “Had they just settled,” he wondered, “for this little rustic, mountain town life? They could have been something! They were smart, well educated, motivated people. Why didn’t they get into business, enter the marketplace, make a name for themselves, get a TV for Pete sake?” Now, sitting on this lonely street corner, in the midst of a world of scared individuals, he began to wonder.
He pulled his expansive frame up off the concrete floor and looked around. Smoke, smog, soot, bleak, black, blah, bleh. He suddenly felt remarkably lonely. The weariness and fatigue he had felt just moments ago suddenly degenerated to heartsickness. It felt like a rock had slowly crept down his throat, struggled through his esophagus and into his stomach where it found its way to the pit and took up residence. He felt remarkably powerlessness to remove it.
He made his way south, or was it east? He couldn’t tell. He could never tell direction anymore. Back home, he used to read direction from the mountains; from the chartreuse sun setting over the San Juan peaks, spitting it’s fire far into the eastern sky in it’s final, triumphant cry for the day. Here, he was lucky if he ever saw the sun. Sure, you could usually tell vaguely where it was in the sky as its light and heat tried vainly to break through the cover of haze and fog and the soot from the smokestacks down at the harbor; but it seemed like it was a million miles away.
It was time to go. He realized that in his walking he had become slightly disoriented and lost his way. It didn’t matter. There was a subway stop. All lines eventually lead to the train station, he thought distantly. He boarded the proper train and found it even more congested than his elevator at work. He longed, like he’d never longed before for someone to make eye contact with him; for someone to know him; to want to see him for who he was. He wanted to rip off his overpriced wool suit, run to the park and swim across the lake, climb the rocks, lay in the grass.
As the subway jerked and lurched forward, his nausea was back. From that point on, his body acted mechanically. He didn’t think, didn’t feel, wasn’t even aware of his surroundings anymore. His movements, his decisions, actions, from that point on all happened subconsciously. His mind essentially shut down.
He awoke on a train chugging through Nebraska. He opened the window of his cabin and allowed his head to clear. He needed coffee. Strong coffee. It felt like a hangover, but a hangover that had built up from years of binge drinking the crowds, traffic and loneliness of his dead-end life. Over the next hours, he felt happier than he’d ever been. Nebraska–once the bein of his existence, as he was forced to endure its emptiness on family road trips–now delighted him with its vast expanses, rocky bluffs, golden corn and wheat fields that spread out before him like a life filled with possibility. He passed through the towns he had remembered from his youth. Those nowhere burgs nestled in their mediocrity of middle America.
It was like heaven.
He allowed himself to fall asleep again. He hadn’t slept this well in years. The chilly air rushing by outside his windows wafted into his nostrils like a thousand fields of lilies. Their soft lullaby whispered him gently to sleep.
In his sleep, he saw a little boy. The boy was crying because his toy sword was broken—lying in pieces at his feet. His eyes were old—much older than the boy’s young age—and filled with salty tears, which streamed down his face into the sand at his feet. His dream-self saw into the boy’s heart and witnessed the battle that had broken his spirit. The dragon had attacked. He spit his insults, spewed his lies and knocked the boy’s feet out from under him. These feet, these legs, the boy had thought were invincible. He had confidence in them. He could never have foreseen a broken marriage, a daughter who wouldn’t speak to him, a life full of fear. Fear that he would continue to fail. He was like the antithesis of Midas. Everything he touched turned to crap. Sure, he had a beautiful apartment, an SUV twice as big as the other puny cars on the road, over a dozen women at his beck and call if he ever wanted them, but now, the thought of all of it made him recoil in disgust. He didn’t trust those things. He felt cold in his apartment, like a stranger to himself when he was with those women. Where had his trust gone? Was it his parents he had lost trust in? No, it was something else. Something far deeper.
He awoke to the soft morning sun glimmering off the tall, rocky crags, through the cabin window and onto his eyelids. As the Collegiate Peaks danced with the morning light, he knew he was home. He knew that the spring wildflowers would be peeking their heads out all through the valley; that the Arkansas River would be flowing high with the spring runoff; that the small clouds over Mount Yale would yield to mighty thunderheads by this afternoon.
He disembarked from the train and gazed up at the wooden “Buena Vista” sign that had spent its years greeting weary travelers and becoming worn with age. He had nothing with him but the suit on his back and his own weary legs. No one knew he was here; no one greeted him or waited to give him a ride. As the rest of the passengers shared hugs and kisses and stories with anxious loved ones, he began the walk toward town alone, feeling deliriously happy. The sun was warm and he could hear the river rushing below; its crashing waves punctuated by the happy screams of children playing at its shores. Children. Had he been one of those once?
As he made his way toward his childhood home on 3rd street, he passed St. Rita’s Catholic Church. Something made him stop. He was staring up at the less than aesthetically pleasing façade when something told him to look down. At his feet, in the gutter, mud-smattered and faded with rain and sun, he saw a toy sword. It was cracked at the base but still held together, though only by a thread. He bent down, picked it up. He turned it over and over again in his hands and marveled at it. He set his face and walked slowly up the dusty, tree-lined street, happy and relieved to be home again.
July 16, 2008
I’ll never forget that spring afternoon, sitting in Noodles and Companyon Colorado Blvd. that my friend Wei got the phone call from his sister back in Malaysia that his mother had fallen ill. I don’t think it was more than a week later that Wei had given away virtually everything he owned and boarded a plane bound for his childhood home. He wouldn’t make it. His mother had died before he had the chance to say his final goodbye and the trip effectively ended his long fight with the U.S. immigration department who had built a case that Wei was no longer welcome in this country. I miss my friend. I received more bad news today–news that he would discontinue his blog, “Torn Notebook”, one of the finest pieces of theological internet blabbery (and I mean that in the best possible sense) out there. While I respect his decision to move on, the internet world is loosing a crucially sane and honest voice. More than anything, I’m sad to see it go because Wei taught me more than most people in this world have, and with his blog, I was able to hold on to some of those conversations I so enjoyed during his years in Denver. Please, if you get a chance, check it out one last time. Explore. It will make you think–I promise.
June 21, 2008
Today my wife, 9 college and post-college aged counselors, and a small flock of high school volunteers finished our first week of our new outdoor ministry. We had around 30 middle schoolers for a week of mountain adventure, camping, and numerous attempts to share the love of Christ and the vision of redemption with these young souls. Middle schoolers are a tough bunch. The week however, was incredible in many ways. I struggled along side the counselors–many of whom were wading into the waters of the 13-year old brain for the first (or second, I suppose) time. Next week, a new group of counselors will take on a new group of teens–this time high schoolers. My temptation is to write off the frustrations of this week and chalk them up to the imminent weirdness of middle school, and move on to high schoolers–a group I feel a little more confident with. But I can’t. These kids demonstrated so starkly the rawness of our culture. Their questions were many, and sometimes more difficult than their ages would have suggested. I remember talking to one of the counselors early in the week who was frustrated and feeling like his group was making progress in their group dynamics and maturity level one day, but completely backslid the next. A friend of mine who is a youth minister gave me some insight into this. He said that the beauty of this week; and of that frustrated counselor was that even though the inquisitive middle schoolers might forget the answer to their respective questions (i.e., moral relativism, drinking, why Catholics believe this or that), what they will remember is that someone–at some point in thier lives–took the time to answer their questions and talk through them with them. And they answered them without saying, “just believe”, or, “because it is”, or some other such phrase–the likes of which plagued so many Catholics in mine and earlier generations.
So many Catholics (particularly the parents of the generation I find myself working with at the moment) have been hurt by the Church in some way. Our common cultural reaction seems to be one of two things: either leaving the Church altogether or even worse, “playing the church game”; in essence, saying, “I don’t really trust you, God, but I’ll keep going to church on Sunday and doing the things I’m supposed to do to keep up my end of the bargin.” These kids deserve better. And that’s what they got, I hope. They got someone–not their parents, incidentally–saying that there is a good reason to believe what that Church suggests; that there is real life–life to the full, in fact–that Jesus came to bring. There is redemption for our relationships with God, within ourselves, with others, and even with the created world, even if it might not look like it most of the time. Hopefully, when the world gets dark, when the questions seem overwhelming, these 11, 12 and 13 year-olds can look back and perhaps say, “I don’t neccesarily remember the exact reason, but I know there was a time when these things made sense, when someone took my concerns seriously , and when redemption really seemed to have something to do with my life.”
June 14, 2008
While preparing for a seminar I’m doing on the Psalms tomorrow, I ran across a profound reflection on the Creed and the ancient Christian understanding of the Incarnation. The reflection comes from Antiochian Orthodox priest and writer, Patrick Henry Reardon in his wonderful book “Christ in the Psalms”. Reflecting on Psalm 8, Reardon says this:
From the very earliest translations of the Creed into the English language, the mystery of the Incarnation has been expressed in a rather puzzling way, even if our long familiarity with the words has reduced our sense of their grammatical enigma. We say of the Son of God that He “became [or "was made] man.”
The puzzle posed by this construction is exactly how to classify the predicate nominative “man” in this instance. Is the sense of the expression indefinite–”a man,” much that we might say that “Fred became a farmer”? But if so, why didn’t the translators simply say that? “He became a man” would not only make sense; it would be both grammatically and theologically correct.
Or is the meaning of the expression merely descriptive–”he became human,” much as we might say “Fred became agrarian”? Here again, the translators could easily have said that, if that is what they meant, because God’s Son most certainly did become human.
No, neither of these translations were deemed adequate. Rendering very literally from the underlying Latin…the translators said that He “became man”, leaving us with this stylistic puzzle. One can hardly think of an occasion, after all, in which we might properly say “Fred became farmer.”
What the translators give us here is an idiom, which is to say a form of expression unique to a particular setting and standing outside of expected usage. On reflection, their recourse to idiom in this case is hardly surprising, for the event under discussion, the Incarnation, is itself “idiomatic” in the extreme, in the sense of being completely unique, utterly unexpected and standing free of normal patterns of acquiescence. How better, after all, to speak of an incomparable and unparalleled event than by recourse to an idiomatic improvisation.
God’s Son did not only ”become human,” though it is true that He did. Nor did He simply “become a man,” although this likewise is a correct statement of the fact. He “became man” rather, in a sense defying grammatical precision as thoroughly as it confounds also the expectations of biology, psychology, metaphysics, and other aspects of the human enterprise, thereby shocked and left reeling, all its vaunted resources now strained and overcharged at the infusion of unspeakable glory.
The most correct formulation of the Incarnation is the one to which we are accustomed: “He became man.” Christ is the archetype of man, bearing all of humanity in Himself. “It was for the new man that human nature was established from the beginning,” wrote St. Nicholas Kavasilas; “the old Adam was not the model of the new, it was the new Adam that was the model of the old.”
June 7, 2008
The following is the first installment of what I consider some important passages from “A Longing for Home; Rethinking a Biblical Ecological Worldview”–my own Master’s thesis. I’ve been thinking about today’s particular passage a lot lately. There is an interesting metaphorical (as well as literal) relationship in Scripture between the wilderness and the garden; between the times of spiritual desert, and the new life that God wishes to give to all of us. How is it that God wishes to use the painful times in our life to lead us to rejuvenation? What does the one say about the other? This section explores the Old Testament and prophetic relationship of the two.
For centuries in the life of the Church and prior, the desert has held a particularly significant theological place. As we have seen, the desert was often the backdrop for exile, although to merely equate desert with exile would be to lose sight of this ecosystem’s true role. Although the Scriptures focus heavily on the desert during Israel’s Exodus from Egypt, the desert is also portrayed in the Old Testament—particularly through the prophets—as the place where YHWH would woo his people back to himself after they turned away from him like an unfaithful bride. Likewise, it was John the Baptist in the New Testament who fulfilled the role of the messenger whom both Isaiah and Malachi foretold would prepare the way for YHWH’s return. Continuing this tradition, many of the early Fathers of the Church sought refuge in the desert, where they produced some of the most beautiful and meditative theology in Christian history. In Scripture itself, there is no shortage of figures that turn to the desert (or wilderness) for strength, inspiration and holy rest. It is in the desert that Moses meets God face to face, that Elijah withdraws to hear the voice of YHWH. Indeed, it is the place where Jesus himself goes for forty days and forty nights to prepare to inaugurate his public ministry. Even St. Paul goes to the desert to prepare for his own ministry after his conversion in Acts of the Apostles. It should come as no surprise then, that in the Christian tradition, the garden and the desert have always been key symbols.
Why the desert? For many, the desert represents a wasteland; a certain absence of beauty. Vegetation is often sparse, life difficult to sustain. Theologian and gardener Vigen Guroian gives us some insight into the attraction. He points out that “the early Christian writers thought that there is no virtue more profound than the perpetual remembrance of our mortality.”[1] “The Bible”, he says, “recalls past paradise; it also prophecies a future blessedness.”[2]
On the flip side, we might speculate on the crucial role of gardens in Hebrew and Christian history. Every human-made garden, Guroian muses, “grows from a seed of Paradise dropped in memory by Adam’s dolorous lament. Sometimes we yearn to return to it, as though Paradise were an ordinary ‘place,’ as if with map and compass we might find it.” He quotes Jennifer Bennett who says perhaps more properly that “the archetype and perfection of every garden ‘is the place where we knew nature before innocence was lost.’”[3] It is in gardening, he says, that man longs to return to the Garden of Eden, to somehow recreate what has been destroyed. In a certain and very real sense the desert leads man to this desire. It is a stark reminder of what it is that humanity has lost.
Not coincidentally, the desert is also the place where God promised to woo his people back to himself. In Hosea, God says that despite her sin, he will “allure” Israel, “and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her.”[4] God chooses to woo his people back to him in the desert because it was the desert where God first revealed himself to his people. Fresh from Egyptian slavery, and surprisingly, right after the golden calf apostasy, God reveals to Moses that he is,
The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means free the guilty.[5]
This is by far the most in-depth view of the nature God up until this point in Scripture. Through the prophets, the Lord wanted his people to remember that it was in the desert that this was first revealed. Hosea continues:
[In the wilderness] I will give her her vineyards, and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.[6]
We see then that the stark reality was not only meant to be a reminder of what mankind had lost in the fall, but also to be a reminder that all hope and trust ought ultimately fall on God. In Isaiah 51:3, we read that
the Lord will comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places, and will make her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song.
Here, as in a chorus of similar Isaian passages[7], we have no mere metaphor. The Lord led his people to the wilderness to remind them of a real, tangible, touchable, smellable reality that had been lost; and to create a real longing for its return. Guroian concludes,
It was entirely fitting, therefore, that Christ was buried in a garden, a seed planted in the ground that blossomed into the flower of a glorified humanity. The New Adam [Jesus] refurbished the devastated garden that the Old Adam left behind. No wonder at the empty tomb, Christ came to Mary Magdalene as the gardener (John 20:15). For he is the Master Gardener, and we, we are his apprentices as well as the subjects of his heavenly husbandry.[8]
This, he says, in essence, is why we garden.
[3]As quoted by Guroian, 45.
[4] Hos 2:14
[5] Ex 34:6-7
[6] Hos 2:15
[7] Consider Is 32:16; 35:1; 35:6; 41:18; 43:20.
[8]Vigen Guroian. The Fragrance of God. 47.
