Staying low

I'm having a quiet day. Yesterday I went to the pool and was experiencing some lower back pain spasms. I hoped getting into the hot tub would help, and while it felt good in the hot tub, I still had the pain when I got out. Ibuprofen is helping today. I'll do some stretching exercises also - I've been down this road before. Today is very cold. It was just 47 degrees in the living room when we got up this morning, and probably about the same in the bedroom - it was cozy under the three blankets, but my nose was cold. Ellen had four blankets and was still cold! I've been reading about Søren Kierkegaard to Ellen aloud, from Perry LeFevre's The Prayers of Kierkegaard, which has a section of K's life and thought - I think I mentioned that in an earlier post titled Rediscovering Kierkegaard. It has been interesting, but I also realize that I am in a very different place than I was in 1954 when I first encountered him. One little example - Kierkegaard puts great emphasis on the individual self. "Standing alone before God," is a crucial concept for him. Every person, to have an authentic existence and authentic faith, must have a highly subjective relationship to God forged out of suffering, a profound sense of sin and guilt, despair and paradox. That hit me powerfully 76 years ago. Today, I am more aware of the reality of our interrelatedness with all creation, and the need to honor and embody that in our actual living. Emphasizing the individual self is part of the problem, insofar as it distracts us from that profound interrelatedness and causes us to put the human species ahead of all other species in importance. Kierkegaard had no awareness of that. His passion, his seriousness about how we live our lives, is still relevant, but it needs some re-interpretation and adaptation to new urgencies. What would it mean to be Kierkegaard today? If Perry Lefevre were still alive, he would be a good person to tackle that question.

Perry LeFevre's book

Perry D. Lefevre as a young man. This studio portrait was made 10 years before I had him as a teacher. He still looked very much like this when I first met him - just a bit more mature. He died in 2006. I last saw him in 1999 when I was at CTS as Pastor-in-Residence and I organized a little group to go to his home (and other retired profs nearby) to sing Christmas carols.