At church today, I was pleasantly surprised to see Lloyd and Joseph. Now I am intrigued with what Lloyd blogged:

The sermon was about being in exile, and being a chosen people. The former condition is one I'm very familiar with; as for being "chosen," I dunno... something about that notion feels disharmonious to me with actual reality and history. But I'm just an ant on the almost infinite scale of the universe, so what do I really know of the whole picture?

I'm still not sure what I heard, or what really happened, but am now beginning to have a vaguely troubling attack of the guilts.

The rhetoric of exile has certainly been strongly sounded deeply at FPCB and also "chosen people" -- but not in any sense of "oh, how special and privileged we are" but more "how much we have to live up to given how much God has given us in His love and mercy".

I walked away wanting to ponder the text of the sermon at greater length (1 Peter 2:1-10) for applications to my own life. I've not been terribly successful at deeply integrating what I've been learning at church with the rest of my life. Maybe I'll do better this week.

Because I'm planning to see some of the 30 or so films of Yasujiro Ozu that the PacificFilmArchives will be showing in November and December, I decided to see at least one ahead of time to judge how excited to get by the upcoming retrospective (this year is the centenary of Ozu's birth).

Last night, I rented and started to watch what many consider Ozu's greatest film, Tokyo Story. I found it really slow-going and, in fact, fell asleep in the middle of the film. I didn't take that as a negative sign of Ozu's artistry (but more of my fatigue). I watched the rest of Tokyo Story this afternoon and found the film a very satisfying experience. Maybe I'm struggling very much with how I as an adult son thousands of miles away from my parents am or am living as a good son -- but the movie speaks right to the heart of my family situation.

I've been doing a lot of writing on my wiki over the last week but not much on my personal weblog. I would like to shift the balance back to incorporate more blogging. Writing on my wiki this week has been a freeing and very productive experience. The way that I've been blogging has been a tad more rigorous than what I was able to comfortably sustain over a longer stretch of time. But I miss writing blog entries too. On MyMainPublicWiki, I feel free to brainstorm, to dash off lists, to drop in phrases without providing sufficient context for folks to understand the pieces as stand-alone items. In contrast, on my this personal weblog, I want my readers to understand more of the context -- and hence I've striven to be reasonably coherent in my blog entries. (Whether I've succeeded is another matter.)

At any rate, I want some more rigor in my writing as a whole and getting myself back into regular blogging should help.