Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Are You Experienced? Have you Ever Been Experienced?
Whatever happened to Jimi, anyway. Oh. Wait. Nevermind.
Reading a couple cool books (yeah I'm back to reading books these days - it's alright) and since my memory isn't what it used to be (they say it's the second thing to go... I forgot what the first was - heh-heh!) I thought I'd write out the more salient passages in here for focus and future reference.
These quotes are from Spiritual Direction & the Encounter With God: A Theological Inquiry, written by William A. Barry, S.J., published by Paulist Press:
Modern philosophy has been grappling with the question of how we can be sure of our knowledge of reality. In his Critique of Pure Reason Emmanuel Kant set the problem by showing rather convincingly that we can only know the phenomenal world, the world of our experience, but have no way of knowing by reason whether this phenomenal world corresponds to the real world. John Macmurray, the Scottish philosopher who died in 1976, came to the conclusion that modern philosophy had started down a blind alley when it accepted Dscartes' dictum, "I think, therefore I am" as the foundation stone for the knowledge of reality and thus of any system of philosophy. With such a starting point Kant's critique is virtually unassailable... starting down this blind alley leads to a dead end.
If my primary knowledge is of myself as thinker then I have no immediate knowledge of aything outside myself. I have to argue to the existence of the outside world, and any argument one uses, Kant has shown, is problematic. If the very existence of a world outside myself is problematic, the existence of God is even more problematic. Agnosticism and atheism are close at hand.
Quoting Macmurray: The reason is that the adoption of the "I think" as the center of reference and starting-point of his philosophy makes it formally impossible to do justice to religious experience. For thought is inherently private; and any philosophy which takes its stand on the primacy of thought, which defines the Self as the Thinker, is committed formally to an extreme logical individualism. It is necessarily egocentric.
In the political realm Macmurray argues that the dead end is totalitarian government.
As an alternative to the Cartesian starting-point Macmurray proposes that philosophy begin with what is primary in our experience; we are not primarily thinkers, we are doers, but knowing doers, that is, agents. Thus philosophy begins with "I do" rather than "I think". Action includes knowledge: "To do, and to know that I do, are two aspects of one and the same experience. This knowledge is absolute and necessary. It is not, however, knowledge of an object but what we may call "knowledge in action," ie., the unreflective primary knowledge of any experience of action. When I act, I know that I am acting and what I intend. Action is the actualizing of a possibility, the determining of a future. The possibility of action implies free will. "To deny free-will is to deny the possibility of action... that I am free is an immediate implication of the 'I do'; and to deny freedom is to assert that no one ever does anything, that no one is capable even of thinking or observing." I am not free with regard to the past. But the future, precisely as future, is not yet determined; it is something determined by action. Thus the condition of possibility for action is my freedom.
When I act, I know that I exist and I also know that what is Not-I (the Other) exists. In action I encounter you.
The primary sense is not sight, but touch. At all times I am in touch with the Other since I am supported by the forces of gravity, the ground upon which I stand or the chair upon which I sit. Touch is the primary sense by which I encounter the other.
In order to act we must regard the world as a unity of action because our action requires the cooperation of the world of which we are a part. If we could not rely on the world outside us we could not act in it.
Our own actions [are] our own contributions to the one inclusive action which is the history of the world.
If we understand the world as one action of God, we mean that God has a unitary intention for the whole creation and that his one action includes and is constituted by all the actions of every created agent and all the events that will ever occur in the history of the universe. The one action of God (the Universal Agent) includes the free actions of all us human beings. Because we really are agents, the future of God's action is not determined, since only the past is determined. So in some mysterious way God's action depends on us.
No created being is excluded from the one action which is the world. The Kingdom of God preached by Jesus can be understood as God's one action. We can understand the Kingdom of God as God's intention for the universe, or rather as God's one action which is the universe.
God is present because the world is God's action.
Any human experience can have a religious dimension, can be an encounter with God...
There is no human experience that is not an encounter. Human beings are part and parcel of the reality of this universe. Even the most "subjective" experience, for example, an hallucination, happens to a person who is encountering the air, the ground, the forces of gravity, etc., of the universe, and these "objective" elements impinge on and condition the experience...
God is not only transcendent but also immanent in his created universe ...the world as one action informed by one intention...
Any action of ours occurs within a universe which is one action of God. Hence at every moment every human being encounters the creator whose action the universe is. Whether we know it or not, God is ingredient in every human experience... Experience is at the least a dyadic affair and it is even possible that it is irreducibly triadic in character...
Quoting John E. Smith: 'Revelation in the religious sense does involve something out of the ordinary, but it is unlikely that the manifestation of God would be intelligible to us at all if it happened only at times when human capacities for experience and understanding are totally suspended. It is more likely that revelation would require, not the suspension of human capabilities but rather their participation in an intensified form... Whatever is totally different from all we can experience and apprehend must be something that we neither experience nor apprehend and, far from calling this God, we should call it nothing at all...'
Smith again: 'There is no experience of God that is not at the same time experience of something else.' By this he means that every experience of God is mediated. We might say that every experience of God is sacramental... there is no experience of anything that is not at the same time an encounter with God. We may not and cannot always be aware that we are encountering God; not every experience has a religious dimension for us. But every human experience can have a religious dimension because God is always present and active in the universe which is God's one action.
Any human experience, hence any medium, can disclose God. It may tax our ingenuity to discern the presence of God in some experiences, but the difficulty should not blind us to the truth... The kataphatic tradition of prayer advocates the use of contemplation of nature and imaginative reading and contemplation of scripture... The apophatic tradition of imageless prayer cannot avoid some mediation if the experience of the Mystery we call God... the difference in the two traditions lies in the desire of the apophatic tradition to bypass the other dimensions to get to the heart of the Mystery, and that of the kataphatic to try to discern the religious dimension within the other dimensions.
Precisely because God is the perfect community, God had no need to create anything else. God creates the universe for no other motive than God's own gratuitous and unfathomable love. It is as if the three Persons said to one another: "Our community is so good; why don't we create a universe where we can invite others to share our community."
In this universe we encounter the Triune God who continually calls us into community.
At the heart of the universe is the creative desire of God to draw us into the universal community whose motive is love and whose intention is community.
[end quotes]
Wait... one more. This one's going on the fridge:
All knowledge is for the sake of action.
And all action is for the sake of friendship.
And all action, for the sake of friendship, is service.
more later...
Friday, October 10, 2008
Best Recipe for Stone Soup I've heard in years
After the Bailout
by Andrei Codrescu link:listen
All Things Considered, October 9, 2008 ·
I was sharpening my chain saw when they called me from Washington, D.C., to ask me how to fix the economy.
This request focused my thoughts, or the lack of 'em, to such a fine point, I gave my 14-inch Echo an edge it never had. Good enough for cutting half a cord at least, to keep the wood stove going through October. I love not paying the oil company a nickel. Except for the half-gallon of gas and the chain oil, but I'm fixin' to make the thing run on plum brandy. I've got a plum tree.
Ah, where were we? The economy, yes: $700 billion is more than enough money to buy every able-bodied American a chain saw, a solar-powered generator and a stake in a communal well and windmill. Also, red dirt and plum trees. That would probably only cost about $100 billion, and you can use the other $600 billion to buy everybody their house outright.
Now everybody can own their house and be green and self-sufficient, and can go back to whatever they were doing before the world ended: watching TV. Except for me. I was sharpening my chain saw.
So I go back to it, and I see a line of refugees coming up the road to move in with me. Oh my God, it's the '70s again. All my deadbeat friends — dead and alive — are being chased out of their homes and heaven for not owing any money. They are debt-free in a world that can't exist without interest rates. The dead are especially egregious in this regard; you can't squeeze even an extra penny out of them.
Oh, no, now that they are getting closer, I don't even think it's people from the '70s: It's people ... from the future!
It's worse than I thought: These are people independent from foreign oil, carrying solar-powered chain saws, full of American ingenuity. After the bailout, they owned their own homes, they didn't pay into a corporate energy grid, and they didn't worry about food because they grew it on the roof. They didn't drive, because they didn't have any jobs to drive to, and every garage in America was the site of an invention that was so darn beneficial nobody needed anything from the store.
Without worries about money, without a job, and with extra space in the garage to grow food and invent, these people forgot about the stock market, stopped borrowing money, even forgot how to shop — in short they stopped being American. These un-Americans got their exercise raking the compost instead of circling the mall; they home-schooled their children and were never again embarrassed that their kids knew more than they did. Heck, they were in heaven, the place where the pursuit of happiness leads to when you stop pursuing it.
Such self-sufficiency made the economy grind to a halt, so the government had to do something again: They called in the Army to chase everyone out of their self-contained greenhouses.
And now they are coming up the road to my place because I'm a poet, and I live in a compound defended by polygamist haikus.
"What did you do wrong?" I asked the first of the refugees to get over the palisades.
"Nothing," he said. "We just got out of debt and stopped watching TV! So the urge to buy things on credit disappeared. So they sent in the troops. First thing they did was to put a 40-inch plasma TV in every room and fixed it just so we couldn't turn it off. Just like in Orwell, only with much sharper images. They are calling this the Second Bailout, or the Bail Back In."
"At least the Second Amendment is safe," I said. "Nobody took away your guns, and the Founding Fathers didn't say anything about TV."
And with that, my chief haiku welcomed them thus:
make yourselves at home
you won't be bailed in or out again
you're safe in Second Life
---
Never heard of Stone Soup? It's the best!
Observe and learn..
by Andrei Codrescu link:listen
All Things Considered, October 9, 2008 ·
I was sharpening my chain saw when they called me from Washington, D.C., to ask me how to fix the economy.
This request focused my thoughts, or the lack of 'em, to such a fine point, I gave my 14-inch Echo an edge it never had. Good enough for cutting half a cord at least, to keep the wood stove going through October. I love not paying the oil company a nickel. Except for the half-gallon of gas and the chain oil, but I'm fixin' to make the thing run on plum brandy. I've got a plum tree.
Ah, where were we? The economy, yes: $700 billion is more than enough money to buy every able-bodied American a chain saw, a solar-powered generator and a stake in a communal well and windmill. Also, red dirt and plum trees. That would probably only cost about $100 billion, and you can use the other $600 billion to buy everybody their house outright.
Now everybody can own their house and be green and self-sufficient, and can go back to whatever they were doing before the world ended: watching TV. Except for me. I was sharpening my chain saw.
So I go back to it, and I see a line of refugees coming up the road to move in with me. Oh my God, it's the '70s again. All my deadbeat friends — dead and alive — are being chased out of their homes and heaven for not owing any money. They are debt-free in a world that can't exist without interest rates. The dead are especially egregious in this regard; you can't squeeze even an extra penny out of them.
Oh, no, now that they are getting closer, I don't even think it's people from the '70s: It's people ... from the future!
It's worse than I thought: These are people independent from foreign oil, carrying solar-powered chain saws, full of American ingenuity. After the bailout, they owned their own homes, they didn't pay into a corporate energy grid, and they didn't worry about food because they grew it on the roof. They didn't drive, because they didn't have any jobs to drive to, and every garage in America was the site of an invention that was so darn beneficial nobody needed anything from the store.
Without worries about money, without a job, and with extra space in the garage to grow food and invent, these people forgot about the stock market, stopped borrowing money, even forgot how to shop — in short they stopped being American. These un-Americans got their exercise raking the compost instead of circling the mall; they home-schooled their children and were never again embarrassed that their kids knew more than they did. Heck, they were in heaven, the place where the pursuit of happiness leads to when you stop pursuing it.
Such self-sufficiency made the economy grind to a halt, so the government had to do something again: They called in the Army to chase everyone out of their self-contained greenhouses.
And now they are coming up the road to my place because I'm a poet, and I live in a compound defended by polygamist haikus.
"What did you do wrong?" I asked the first of the refugees to get over the palisades.
"Nothing," he said. "We just got out of debt and stopped watching TV! So the urge to buy things on credit disappeared. So they sent in the troops. First thing they did was to put a 40-inch plasma TV in every room and fixed it just so we couldn't turn it off. Just like in Orwell, only with much sharper images. They are calling this the Second Bailout, or the Bail Back In."
"At least the Second Amendment is safe," I said. "Nobody took away your guns, and the Founding Fathers didn't say anything about TV."
And with that, my chief haiku welcomed them thus:
make yourselves at home
you won't be bailed in or out again
you're safe in Second Life
---
Never heard of Stone Soup? It's the best!
Observe and learn..
Friday, May 30, 2008
a keeper to pass along to you
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Credo
Ellul rocks:
BELIEF AND FAITH
Out of the single verb "to believe" come noun forms for two radically antithetical actions: belief and faith. However, when I wish to use a verb form to give expression to my faith, I still have to use "to believe," unless I happen to use an even worse formula, "to have faith."
Belief provides answers to people's questions while faith never does. People believe so as to find assurance, a solution, an answer to their questions to fashion for themselves a system of beliefs. Faith (biblical faith) is completely different. The purpose of revelation is not to supply us with explanations, but to get us to listen to questions.
Faith is, as Barth so often reminds us, in the first instance, hearing. Belief talks and talks, it wallows in words, it interpolates the gods, it takes the initiative. Faith takes an entirely opposite stance: it waits, remains on guard, picks up signs, knows what to make of the most delicate parables; it listens patiently to the silence until that silence is filled up with what it takes to be the indisputable word of God.
Faith isolates; belief (Christian or otherwise) brings together. We find ourselves joined with others in the same institutional current, all of us oriented toward the same object of belief, sharing the same ideas, following the same rituals, enrolled in the same organization, be it social or religious, speaking the same language. Belief is quite useful for the smooth functioning of society. Belief is the key to the consensus we look for, the one long proclaimed essential of communal life. Faith works in exactly the opposite way. Faith individualizes; it is always an exclusively personal matter. Faith is the personal relationship with a God who reveals Himself as a person.
This God singularizes people, sets them apart, and confers on each an identity comparable to none other. The person who listens to His word is the only one to hear it; he or she is separated from the others, becomes unique, simply because the tie that binds that individual to God is unique, unlike any other, incommunicable, a unique relationship with a unique, absolutely incomparable God. God particularizes, singularizes the person to whom He says, "I call you by your name" (Isa. 45:4). Faith separates people and makes each of them unique. In the Bible "holy" means separated". To be holy is to be separated from everyone else, to be made unique for the sake of a task that can be accomplished by no one else, which one receives through faith.
Faith presupposes doubt while belief excludes it. The opposite of doubt isn't faith, but belief. The "knights" of belief comply unfailingly with the law and the commandments. They are unbending in their convictions, intolerant of any deviation. In the articulation of belief they press rigor and absolutism to their limits. They unceasingly refine the expression of their belief and seek to give it explicit intellectual formulation in a system as coherent and complete as possible. They insist on total orthodoxy. Ways of thinking and acting are rigidly codified. This leads to a very high level of efficiency; the believer is a person who gets the job done, but all this activity is hollow at the core. Believers have so little internal reality of their own that they can live and express that reality only by and in a conventional established unit. They are the people of gatherings. Believers find encouragement and certitude in the presence of others - the certitude that those others really believe - and so community life fills up the existential void.
Multiplying the number of liturgies, commitments, and activities gives believers complete satisfaction - in the midst of them they have no need of questioning the truth or reality of their belief; activity keeps them busy. But in this situation you can imagine how intolerable the diversity of beliefs becomes. There must be neither doubt nor uncertainty, for that would be radically destructive. So diversity cannot be tolerated. Diversity is always a source of further questions, of self-criticism, and thus of possible doubt, so belief is rapidly transformed into passwords, rites, and orthodoxy.
Faith is summarized in the words, "I believe; help my unbelief" (Mark 9:24). Faith constrains me above all to measure how much I don't live by faith; how seldom faith fills up my life. Faith puts to the test every element of my life and society; it spares nothing. It leads me ineluctably to question all my certitudes, all my moralities, beliefs, and policies. It forbids me to attach ultimate significance to any expression of human activity. It detaches and delivers me from money and the family, from my job and my knowledge. It is the surest road to realizing that "the only thing I know is that I don't know anything." Faith leaves nothing intact. The only thing faith can bring me to recognize is my impotence, my incapacity, my inadequacy, my incompleteness, and consequently my incredulity (naturally faith is the most unerring and lethal weapon against all beliefs).
Belief is reassuring. People who live in the world of belief feel safe. On the contrary, faith is forever placing us on the razor's edge. Though it knows that God is the Father, it never minimizes His power. "Who then is this, that even wind and the sea obey Him?" (Mark 4:41). That is faith's question. For belief things are simple: God is almighty. We normalize God. We get comfortable with God's power. It is faith alone that can appreciate the immensity of God, and His true nature.
The doubt that constitutes an integral part of faith concerns myself, not God's revelation or His love or the presence of Jesus Christ. It is doubt about the effectiveness, even the legitimacy, of what I do and the forces I obey in my church and in society. Furthermore, faith puts itself to the test. If I discern the stirrings of faith within me, the first rule is not to deceive myself, not to abandon myself to belief indiscriminately. I have to subject my beliefs to rigorous criticism. I have to listen to all denials and attacks on them, so that I can know how solid the object of my faith is. Faith will not stand for half-truths and half-certainties. It obliges me to face the fact that I am nothing, and in so doing I receive the gift of everything.
Belief relates to things, to realities, to behaviors that are raised to the status of an ultimate value that it worthy dying for. Belief transforms next-to-last human realities into ultimate, absolute, foundational realities. It turns everything that belongs to the order of the Promise, of God Word, of the Kingdom into epiphenomena, into sweet pious words, ways of making life easier, and a process of self-justification. Faith runs totally counter to this. To begin with, faith acknowledges the Ultimate in all its irrefragable truth, and so it depreciates and attaches little importance to whatever offers itself as a substitute for that Ultimate. It is not a matter of looking to some external ultimate reality; the Kingdom of heaven is (at present) in you or among you. As of now it is you who constitute it. Faith is the demand that we must incarnate the Kingdom of God now in this world and this age.
One never moves from belief to faith, whereas faith often deteriorates into belief. You can't get to faith by way of any old religion, or belief, or some vague spiritual exaltation, or aesthetic emotions. It is not "better" from a Christian viewpoint to "believe" than not to believe, to "have religion" than not to have it. There is no road from belief to faith. You can't transform a conviction of the value of rites into the act of standing alone in the presence of God.
The reverse is true: every belief is an obstacle to faith. Beliefs get in the way because they satisfy the need for religion, because they lead to spiritual choices that are substitutes for faith; they prevent us from discovering, listening to, and accepting the faith revealed in Jesus Christ.
Kierkegaard argues that it is more difficult for people brought up on all the lore of Christmas, for those who have had all their little religious needs met by the church, to receive the shock of revelation, to discover the Unique One, and to enter into the dark night of the soul, than it is for those who have done nothing but search continuously without ever coming upon a satisfying answer.
Belonging to Christendom and to one of its churches is the main obstacle to becoming a Christian. There is no path leading from a little bit of religion (of whatever kind) to a little more and finally to faith. Faith shatters all religion and everything spiritual. On the other hand, the passage from faith to belief is always possible and always a threat. It is the downhill slide to which the church and the Christian life are always subject. Faith is constantly degenerating into multiple beliefs. No phrase expresses this imperceptible change better than "to have faith."
When we take possession of faith and claim to be the proprietor of faith, we naturally think we can dispose of it as we wish. The only thing we are really entitled to say is that "Faith has me." The rest is mere belief.
Faith is neither belief nor credulity, neither a reasonable acquisition or an intellectual achievement; it is rather the conjunction of an ultimate decision and a revelation, and bids me bring about the incarnation of the ultimate reality today, the Kingdom of God present among us. I am summoned by a Word that is eternal, here and now, universal, personal. I accept this summons. I am willing to act responsible; I enter upon an illogical adventure, knowing neither its origin nor its end. Such is faith.
Apologetics tries to prove that Christianity is true, that it is superior to other religions (which of course leaves us arguing on the religious level), and that it answers all human questions. We can show that Christianity makes a reasonable case, but these debates among intellectuals are utterly sterile: nobody ever succeeds in persuading anyone else. No apologetics have ever brought any unbelievers to faith, even when they could see that they had been beaten by their adversary's rhetoric. There is no intellectual road to the attitude (and more than the attitude the life) of faith. The logical, intellectualist approach winds up in a ditch. The intellect does not call forth or show the way to faith.
Belief is a refuge and flight from reality. It is seized upon as protection, as a guarantee or insurance policy. Faith is taking risks, leaving behind safety and security, scorning guarantees, stepping out of the boat onto the Sea of Galilee. If we live by faith there is no need to plead with Him to save us from danger. It is enough to know that since He is there, even if the danger should prove mortal, whatever God's love wishes is being done and will be done in us, no matter what.
Why believe? (Using "believe" for participating in faith.) We have no answer for it. Believe for what? With an eye to what? To achieve what? To get what? We believe for nothing. There is no objective reason for faith; you have to live it. Faith has no origin or objective. The moment it admits of any objective, it ceases to be faith. If you believe in God in order to be protected, shielded, healed, or saved, then it's not faith, which is gratuitous. This will prove shocking, especially to Protestants, who have talked so much about salvation through faith, about faith as the condition of salvation, that they end up saying you believe so that you'll be saved. But we have to keep coming back to grace and its gratuitousness. If God loves and saves humankind without asking any price, the counterpart to this is that God intends to be believed and loved without self-interest or purpose, simply for nothing. It is scandalous, and yet so easy to understand when you think of love. The moment that a man and a woman love one another for something, whether it be for money or prestige or beauty or job, it is no longer love. Love is without cause and selfish interests; love is without reason.
Faith is constant interplay; it never stagnates or settles down. One cannot incarnate faith in some static, definitive fashion. Faith is the perennially new critical point. Faith therefore implies the continual presence of temptation and an ever clearer vision of reality; it implies criticism of Christian religion, of civilizing missions, of Christian moral codes imposed from the outside, of a Christian truth that excludes claims to it from any other area of human culture. Faith is the point of rupture (not with our fellow human beings) but with religions. Faith must proceed to criticize, to judge, and radically to reject all human religious claims. We have to be careful here; it is not people who are being judged or criticized here; it is their will to power and the expression of that in religion. But faith's critique of religion can be rooted only in its critique of itself.
Faith leads me to take part in everything, while at the same time it shows me everything in a light that is not that of reason, experience, or common sense. This is not a intellectual operation, but an existential attitude. Faith brings about the "new person" manifested in love and lucidity.
The faith of Christians in the church today has gone astray. Their obsession with the contents of faith (theologians quarreling over technical terms) instead of with the movement and life of faith is what has triggered our worldwide crisis. But the unchangeable remains unchangeable. The Ultimate One, the Unconditioned, the Wholly Other has not changed. Faith is our responsibility to see to it that the transcendent, the Unconditioned, the Totally Other Being, becomes an active reality here and now. Faith moves mountains only when it speaks to the omnipotent Creator, and when it also accepts its role of hearing the word of faith.
From: The Living Faith: Belief and Doubt in a Perilous World. San Francisco: Harper and Row, Publishers. 1983.
BELIEF AND FAITH
Out of the single verb "to believe" come noun forms for two radically antithetical actions: belief and faith. However, when I wish to use a verb form to give expression to my faith, I still have to use "to believe," unless I happen to use an even worse formula, "to have faith."
Belief provides answers to people's questions while faith never does. People believe so as to find assurance, a solution, an answer to their questions to fashion for themselves a system of beliefs. Faith (biblical faith) is completely different. The purpose of revelation is not to supply us with explanations, but to get us to listen to questions.
Faith is, as Barth so often reminds us, in the first instance, hearing. Belief talks and talks, it wallows in words, it interpolates the gods, it takes the initiative. Faith takes an entirely opposite stance: it waits, remains on guard, picks up signs, knows what to make of the most delicate parables; it listens patiently to the silence until that silence is filled up with what it takes to be the indisputable word of God.
Faith isolates; belief (Christian or otherwise) brings together. We find ourselves joined with others in the same institutional current, all of us oriented toward the same object of belief, sharing the same ideas, following the same rituals, enrolled in the same organization, be it social or religious, speaking the same language. Belief is quite useful for the smooth functioning of society. Belief is the key to the consensus we look for, the one long proclaimed essential of communal life. Faith works in exactly the opposite way. Faith individualizes; it is always an exclusively personal matter. Faith is the personal relationship with a God who reveals Himself as a person.
This God singularizes people, sets them apart, and confers on each an identity comparable to none other. The person who listens to His word is the only one to hear it; he or she is separated from the others, becomes unique, simply because the tie that binds that individual to God is unique, unlike any other, incommunicable, a unique relationship with a unique, absolutely incomparable God. God particularizes, singularizes the person to whom He says, "I call you by your name" (Isa. 45:4). Faith separates people and makes each of them unique. In the Bible "holy" means separated". To be holy is to be separated from everyone else, to be made unique for the sake of a task that can be accomplished by no one else, which one receives through faith.
Faith presupposes doubt while belief excludes it. The opposite of doubt isn't faith, but belief. The "knights" of belief comply unfailingly with the law and the commandments. They are unbending in their convictions, intolerant of any deviation. In the articulation of belief they press rigor and absolutism to their limits. They unceasingly refine the expression of their belief and seek to give it explicit intellectual formulation in a system as coherent and complete as possible. They insist on total orthodoxy. Ways of thinking and acting are rigidly codified. This leads to a very high level of efficiency; the believer is a person who gets the job done, but all this activity is hollow at the core. Believers have so little internal reality of their own that they can live and express that reality only by and in a conventional established unit. They are the people of gatherings. Believers find encouragement and certitude in the presence of others - the certitude that those others really believe - and so community life fills up the existential void.
Multiplying the number of liturgies, commitments, and activities gives believers complete satisfaction - in the midst of them they have no need of questioning the truth or reality of their belief; activity keeps them busy. But in this situation you can imagine how intolerable the diversity of beliefs becomes. There must be neither doubt nor uncertainty, for that would be radically destructive. So diversity cannot be tolerated. Diversity is always a source of further questions, of self-criticism, and thus of possible doubt, so belief is rapidly transformed into passwords, rites, and orthodoxy.
Faith is summarized in the words, "I believe; help my unbelief" (Mark 9:24). Faith constrains me above all to measure how much I don't live by faith; how seldom faith fills up my life. Faith puts to the test every element of my life and society; it spares nothing. It leads me ineluctably to question all my certitudes, all my moralities, beliefs, and policies. It forbids me to attach ultimate significance to any expression of human activity. It detaches and delivers me from money and the family, from my job and my knowledge. It is the surest road to realizing that "the only thing I know is that I don't know anything." Faith leaves nothing intact. The only thing faith can bring me to recognize is my impotence, my incapacity, my inadequacy, my incompleteness, and consequently my incredulity (naturally faith is the most unerring and lethal weapon against all beliefs).
Belief is reassuring. People who live in the world of belief feel safe. On the contrary, faith is forever placing us on the razor's edge. Though it knows that God is the Father, it never minimizes His power. "Who then is this, that even wind and the sea obey Him?" (Mark 4:41). That is faith's question. For belief things are simple: God is almighty. We normalize God. We get comfortable with God's power. It is faith alone that can appreciate the immensity of God, and His true nature.
The doubt that constitutes an integral part of faith concerns myself, not God's revelation or His love or the presence of Jesus Christ. It is doubt about the effectiveness, even the legitimacy, of what I do and the forces I obey in my church and in society. Furthermore, faith puts itself to the test. If I discern the stirrings of faith within me, the first rule is not to deceive myself, not to abandon myself to belief indiscriminately. I have to subject my beliefs to rigorous criticism. I have to listen to all denials and attacks on them, so that I can know how solid the object of my faith is. Faith will not stand for half-truths and half-certainties. It obliges me to face the fact that I am nothing, and in so doing I receive the gift of everything.
Belief relates to things, to realities, to behaviors that are raised to the status of an ultimate value that it worthy dying for. Belief transforms next-to-last human realities into ultimate, absolute, foundational realities. It turns everything that belongs to the order of the Promise, of God Word, of the Kingdom into epiphenomena, into sweet pious words, ways of making life easier, and a process of self-justification. Faith runs totally counter to this. To begin with, faith acknowledges the Ultimate in all its irrefragable truth, and so it depreciates and attaches little importance to whatever offers itself as a substitute for that Ultimate. It is not a matter of looking to some external ultimate reality; the Kingdom of heaven is (at present) in you or among you. As of now it is you who constitute it. Faith is the demand that we must incarnate the Kingdom of God now in this world and this age.
One never moves from belief to faith, whereas faith often deteriorates into belief. You can't get to faith by way of any old religion, or belief, or some vague spiritual exaltation, or aesthetic emotions. It is not "better" from a Christian viewpoint to "believe" than not to believe, to "have religion" than not to have it. There is no road from belief to faith. You can't transform a conviction of the value of rites into the act of standing alone in the presence of God.
The reverse is true: every belief is an obstacle to faith. Beliefs get in the way because they satisfy the need for religion, because they lead to spiritual choices that are substitutes for faith; they prevent us from discovering, listening to, and accepting the faith revealed in Jesus Christ.
Kierkegaard argues that it is more difficult for people brought up on all the lore of Christmas, for those who have had all their little religious needs met by the church, to receive the shock of revelation, to discover the Unique One, and to enter into the dark night of the soul, than it is for those who have done nothing but search continuously without ever coming upon a satisfying answer.
Belonging to Christendom and to one of its churches is the main obstacle to becoming a Christian. There is no path leading from a little bit of religion (of whatever kind) to a little more and finally to faith. Faith shatters all religion and everything spiritual. On the other hand, the passage from faith to belief is always possible and always a threat. It is the downhill slide to which the church and the Christian life are always subject. Faith is constantly degenerating into multiple beliefs. No phrase expresses this imperceptible change better than "to have faith."
When we take possession of faith and claim to be the proprietor of faith, we naturally think we can dispose of it as we wish. The only thing we are really entitled to say is that "Faith has me." The rest is mere belief.
Faith is neither belief nor credulity, neither a reasonable acquisition or an intellectual achievement; it is rather the conjunction of an ultimate decision and a revelation, and bids me bring about the incarnation of the ultimate reality today, the Kingdom of God present among us. I am summoned by a Word that is eternal, here and now, universal, personal. I accept this summons. I am willing to act responsible; I enter upon an illogical adventure, knowing neither its origin nor its end. Such is faith.
Apologetics tries to prove that Christianity is true, that it is superior to other religions (which of course leaves us arguing on the religious level), and that it answers all human questions. We can show that Christianity makes a reasonable case, but these debates among intellectuals are utterly sterile: nobody ever succeeds in persuading anyone else. No apologetics have ever brought any unbelievers to faith, even when they could see that they had been beaten by their adversary's rhetoric. There is no intellectual road to the attitude (and more than the attitude the life) of faith. The logical, intellectualist approach winds up in a ditch. The intellect does not call forth or show the way to faith.
Belief is a refuge and flight from reality. It is seized upon as protection, as a guarantee or insurance policy. Faith is taking risks, leaving behind safety and security, scorning guarantees, stepping out of the boat onto the Sea of Galilee. If we live by faith there is no need to plead with Him to save us from danger. It is enough to know that since He is there, even if the danger should prove mortal, whatever God's love wishes is being done and will be done in us, no matter what.
Why believe? (Using "believe" for participating in faith.) We have no answer for it. Believe for what? With an eye to what? To achieve what? To get what? We believe for nothing. There is no objective reason for faith; you have to live it. Faith has no origin or objective. The moment it admits of any objective, it ceases to be faith. If you believe in God in order to be protected, shielded, healed, or saved, then it's not faith, which is gratuitous. This will prove shocking, especially to Protestants, who have talked so much about salvation through faith, about faith as the condition of salvation, that they end up saying you believe so that you'll be saved. But we have to keep coming back to grace and its gratuitousness. If God loves and saves humankind without asking any price, the counterpart to this is that God intends to be believed and loved without self-interest or purpose, simply for nothing. It is scandalous, and yet so easy to understand when you think of love. The moment that a man and a woman love one another for something, whether it be for money or prestige or beauty or job, it is no longer love. Love is without cause and selfish interests; love is without reason.
Faith is constant interplay; it never stagnates or settles down. One cannot incarnate faith in some static, definitive fashion. Faith is the perennially new critical point. Faith therefore implies the continual presence of temptation and an ever clearer vision of reality; it implies criticism of Christian religion, of civilizing missions, of Christian moral codes imposed from the outside, of a Christian truth that excludes claims to it from any other area of human culture. Faith is the point of rupture (not with our fellow human beings) but with religions. Faith must proceed to criticize, to judge, and radically to reject all human religious claims. We have to be careful here; it is not people who are being judged or criticized here; it is their will to power and the expression of that in religion. But faith's critique of religion can be rooted only in its critique of itself.
Faith leads me to take part in everything, while at the same time it shows me everything in a light that is not that of reason, experience, or common sense. This is not a intellectual operation, but an existential attitude. Faith brings about the "new person" manifested in love and lucidity.
The faith of Christians in the church today has gone astray. Their obsession with the contents of faith (theologians quarreling over technical terms) instead of with the movement and life of faith is what has triggered our worldwide crisis. But the unchangeable remains unchangeable. The Ultimate One, the Unconditioned, the Wholly Other has not changed. Faith is our responsibility to see to it that the transcendent, the Unconditioned, the Totally Other Being, becomes an active reality here and now. Faith moves mountains only when it speaks to the omnipotent Creator, and when it also accepts its role of hearing the word of faith.
From: The Living Faith: Belief and Doubt in a Perilous World. San Francisco: Harper and Row, Publishers. 1983.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Holy Saturday, 2008
It was a dark and stormy night, when
the hand of the Father Almighty,
creator of heaven and earth
and all that is,
seen and unseen,
came upon a human being,
a son of man, born of a woman
(bone of their bones and flesh of their flesh).
And the LORD God brought this human being out
in the Spirit of the LORD
and settled him down in this valley,
smack dab in the midst of
this very low and very dark place;
and this place
was full of
bones.
And he led the man
through this valley
in the shadow
of death,
and he walked
around and amongst
all the bones.
And all he saw
wherever he went
and as far as he could see
was bones - so many bones
laying all around on the ground
all of them
disjointed, all
disconnected, all
scattered abroad - multitudes upon multitudes of
bones.
And they were very dry.
Just about gone
to dust...
And the LORD said
to him,
"Son of man, can these bones live?"
And he answered,
"O Lord GOD... only you know."
Then he said to him,
Prophesy over these bones - speak,
proclaim, say outloud to these old bones,
O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD spoken through this Prophet.
The Lord GOD, the Spirit, the Giver of Life
has this to say to all you old dry bones:
Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.
And I will lay sinews and tendons and connecting tissue upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin,
and I will put breath in you, and you shall live,
and you shall know - know in your bones - that I am the ONE.
So the Son of man prophesied as he was told.
And as he spoke the word aloud, there was a sound, and behold, a clamorous rattling,
and all the bones came together,
bone reconnected and rejoined to bone,
all the parts joined together with others, arranged
just so, and they all
fit - perfectly.
And look, behold, tendons and connective tissue
grew between them - muscles formed,
and skin covered them.
But there was no breath in them.
(What is born of flesh is flesh, and what is born of Spirit is spirit.)
Then the LORD God said to the prophet,
Prophesy to the breath;
prophesy, son of man, and send your voice into the wind, saying
Thus says the Lord GOD:
Come from the four winds, O breath, and
breathe on these dead that they may live.
So he prophesied as he was told.
And so the breath of God came into them, and
they lived, and stood on their feet, in full stature,
an exceedingly great company of hosts.
. . .
Then he said to him,
Son of man, the bones of my people cry out from the ground. They say,
'We are dried up!
We have no hope!
We are disconnected.
We are scattered and disjointed.
We are indeed cut off.'
Therefore prophesy, and lift up your voice for them, saying,
Thus says your GOD:
Behold, I will open the way and raise you from your graves, O my people.
And I will bring you out
to the place I promised and have prepared for you
from the foundation of the world -
my redeemed creation made new - the Beloved Community,
the Fellowship of Saints,
that Heavenly City, New Jerusalem,
our true long Home.
And you shall know, O my people, that I am the ONE-IN-ALL,
when I open your graves, and raise you out from the death - out of your darkest and lowest and loneliest most solitary places.
And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live.
And I will place you in My most blessed company.
Then you shall know
Who I Really Am.
I have spoken and I will do it, declares your Father the Almighty.
Truly, truly, I say to you, The hour is coming and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they who hear shall live. And breathe. And have their being in God and God's people, to enjoy from henceforth and forever our most excellent and delightsome company.
the hand of the Father Almighty,
creator of heaven and earth
and all that is,
seen and unseen,
came upon a human being,
a son of man, born of a woman
(bone of their bones and flesh of their flesh).
And the LORD God brought this human being out
in the Spirit of the LORD
and settled him down in this valley,
smack dab in the midst of
this very low and very dark place;
and this place
was full of
bones.
And he led the man
through this valley
in the shadow
of death,
and he walked
around and amongst
all the bones.
And all he saw
wherever he went
and as far as he could see
was bones - so many bones
laying all around on the ground
all of them
disjointed, all
disconnected, all
scattered abroad - multitudes upon multitudes of
bones.
And they were very dry.
Just about gone
to dust...
And the LORD said
to him,
"Son of man, can these bones live?"
And he answered,
"O Lord GOD... only you know."
Then he said to him,
Prophesy over these bones - speak,
proclaim, say outloud to these old bones,
O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD spoken through this Prophet.
The Lord GOD, the Spirit, the Giver of Life
has this to say to all you old dry bones:
Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.
And I will lay sinews and tendons and connecting tissue upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin,
and I will put breath in you, and you shall live,
and you shall know - know in your bones - that I am the ONE.
So the Son of man prophesied as he was told.
And as he spoke the word aloud, there was a sound, and behold, a clamorous rattling,
and all the bones came together,
bone reconnected and rejoined to bone,
all the parts joined together with others, arranged
just so, and they all
fit - perfectly.
And look, behold, tendons and connective tissue
grew between them - muscles formed,
and skin covered them.
But there was no breath in them.
(What is born of flesh is flesh, and what is born of Spirit is spirit.)
Then the LORD God said to the prophet,
Prophesy to the breath;
prophesy, son of man, and send your voice into the wind, saying
Thus says the Lord GOD:
Come from the four winds, O breath, and
breathe on these dead that they may live.
So he prophesied as he was told.
And so the breath of God came into them, and
they lived, and stood on their feet, in full stature,
an exceedingly great company of hosts.
. . .
Then he said to him,
Son of man, the bones of my people cry out from the ground. They say,
'We are dried up!
We have no hope!
We are disconnected.
We are scattered and disjointed.
We are indeed cut off.'
Therefore prophesy, and lift up your voice for them, saying,
Thus says your GOD:
Behold, I will open the way and raise you from your graves, O my people.
And I will bring you out
to the place I promised and have prepared for you
from the foundation of the world -
my redeemed creation made new - the Beloved Community,
the Fellowship of Saints,
that Heavenly City, New Jerusalem,
our true long Home.
And you shall know, O my people, that I am the ONE-IN-ALL,
when I open your graves, and raise you out from the death - out of your darkest and lowest and loneliest most solitary places.
And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live.
And I will place you in My most blessed company.
Then you shall know
Who I Really Am.
I have spoken and I will do it, declares your Father the Almighty.
Truly, truly, I say to you, The hour is coming and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they who hear shall live. And breathe. And have their being in God and God's people, to enjoy from henceforth and forever our most excellent and delightsome company.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
a different meaning since you've been gone...
huh-boy
here we go...
On the one hand: "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear: because fear has torment. He that fears is not made perfect in love."
Ah, Perfect Love. What a Babe. What a Dreamboat. Who hasn't wanted to board that relation-ship and just cruise on through the rest of one's life powered by Unconditional Love...
And all the brave or bewildered souls who've dared to come aboard - only to find their fears not only weren't cast out as hoped, as they expected, but were in fact made even more apparent and exquisite. As it happens, they chased after them like gulls out into the deep, and then eventually came home - en masse - to roost and to breed in the masts, on the anchor, on the rails, in our hair, or hung around our necks like stinky albatrosses.
It's a high wierdness for sure, but here's the deal - the more you love and are loved, the more vulnerable you notice you become, the more it seems you fear - losing - losing your beloved/losing yourself/losing control/losing... the love. Or worst of all, the fear of finding out you've been decieved. You bought it. And it's not so perfect as you first thought.
At the point in the journey together that that fear first alights on one of the shipmates, all hell breaks loose. All the eggs that incrementally and exponentially hatch from then on, and all the resultant slippery poop all over the deck, eventually - inevitably - (unless you get a handle on it, which you can't - trying to get a handle on it is the worse thing you could do, but you try anyway) it all gets so out of hand that it puts a serious kabosh on so many high hopes you started out with. The hope turns out to be a cosmic tease.
And the love - it waxes cold. It's not the Loveboat after all. It's not even a Battleship. It's a dinky little dinghy. A ragtop rowboat with two oars. That inconveniently double as all too convenient shields or whack-a-mole mallets depending on which side of the whack you're on. All those wacky whackers and the wickets they whack with. Sooner or later you find yourself dead in the water and far out to sea, hungry as a bum and thirsty as hell. And tired. Bone weary. Exhausted. The wind is out of your sail. That's when you start hearing voices in the still air - of mermaids calling you out - and they're singing the Same. Danged. Song. The one with your name in it. The Song with the Heavenly Strains and the haunting refrain that enticed you go overboard in the first place - Perfect Love. Perfect Love. Just believe... take a chance...
Arise and come, and come to me.
The moon is soft upon the sea.
Oh come and lose yourself in me
And I will be the air you breathe.
A cloak of green, a crown of foam
If you will call the ocean home.
A salt perfume, a throne of pearl
If you will sail beyond the world.
Arise and come...
Come to me...
And by Jove, you're drawn to it! And for some ungodly (or is it?) reason you want to jump ship. Again!
Despite it all, The Dream Remains The Same! Go figure! What's up with that?
Well, that's how my travelogue reads so far. I'd like to read one that hasn't. One that isn't boring, that won't put me to sleep. I don't want to go to sleep. I want to wake up. And smell the roses. Or the stinky albatrosses. Either way, I want Real. I know how to deal with real. I think. I know I don't know how to deal with lies and pretense. Even and maybe especially pretty little lies - all the hope-sos and wishful, magical thinking. My own, especially. They're what makes me truly crazy. They skirt around the danger zone, and we don't talk about it later. They don't face the fears. So they disconnect even more. And so make me even more afraid. More crazy. That undying and incorruptible Hope makes me crazy, too, for sure - but not like that. So far, anyway. It kills me, as perfect love is wont to do, but softly. With His Song. But the lies and the ghosts - they just wreck it.
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
Trouble is, sometimes, when I'm especially hungry or thirsty, disconnected, afraid I'm going crazy, or just plain afraid, those damned pretty lies sound so hopeful, so hope inspiring... That's when I need extra eyes, others' eyes, for perspective, and proportion, for discernment. And even still the Draw, the Main Attraction which all attractions suggest and intimate, that Big Draw that draws everything and everyone upward and unto Itself as we dance along the event horizon of His Eye (hey, sounds more spicey than shuffle along this mortal coil!), continues apace. And me, I'm sucked into the undertoad for yet another go-round. I'm afraid so. Woe is me. Woe. I am undone. Or done in. Or just plain done.
But no. Like the Missionary to the Headhunters said while waist deep in the big soup pot plaintively asserted, "I'm not done yet!" When the pot gets hot enough, the Missionary will recognize he's a cannibal, too - a Maneater. His first communion.
Anyway, be that as it may - all that to say this: Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because *as he is, so are we in this world*.
Which is to say - absurdly, astonishingly - it's all good. And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
So I'm thinkin', maybe let's have another look at these nifty little oar dealies. And maybe take a another good long look at our shipmates, sans oar-in-the-moley-faces. And a good long listen. And definitely another look at the Mercy. A good, long gaze at that strange yet familiar Face. Maybe then we could start rowing in Eden a bit more in sync? Perhaps even tack ourselves into a sweeter breeze (or is it a whirlpool, the swirling eddies created by all the cross-currents?) that might give us dumsnut wannabe Ancient Mariners (with our handy-dandy but stoopid-ijit cross-bows) a chance of blowing this crazy pop-stand and getting out of Dodge? Maybe even remembering our First Love. Maybe. Have to hope for a second wind. What else can a Body do in such a straight?
I'm thinking about the church, here, too. It's all connected. Despite how it looks at first glance. Even so, lash me to your Mast, Sailor Man. Trust the process. Trust the flow. Like I have a clue what that means. But I'll keep a wet finger aloft.
here we go...
On the one hand: "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear: because fear has torment. He that fears is not made perfect in love."
Ah, Perfect Love. What a Babe. What a Dreamboat. Who hasn't wanted to board that relation-ship and just cruise on through the rest of one's life powered by Unconditional Love...
And all the brave or bewildered souls who've dared to come aboard - only to find their fears not only weren't cast out as hoped, as they expected, but were in fact made even more apparent and exquisite. As it happens, they chased after them like gulls out into the deep, and then eventually came home - en masse - to roost and to breed in the masts, on the anchor, on the rails, in our hair, or hung around our necks like stinky albatrosses.
It's a high wierdness for sure, but here's the deal - the more you love and are loved, the more vulnerable you notice you become, the more it seems you fear - losing - losing your beloved/losing yourself/losing control/losing... the love. Or worst of all, the fear of finding out you've been decieved. You bought it. And it's not so perfect as you first thought.
At the point in the journey together that that fear first alights on one of the shipmates, all hell breaks loose. All the eggs that incrementally and exponentially hatch from then on, and all the resultant slippery poop all over the deck, eventually - inevitably - (unless you get a handle on it, which you can't - trying to get a handle on it is the worse thing you could do, but you try anyway) it all gets so out of hand that it puts a serious kabosh on so many high hopes you started out with. The hope turns out to be a cosmic tease.
And the love - it waxes cold. It's not the Loveboat after all. It's not even a Battleship. It's a dinky little dinghy. A ragtop rowboat with two oars. That inconveniently double as all too convenient shields or whack-a-mole mallets depending on which side of the whack you're on. All those wacky whackers and the wickets they whack with. Sooner or later you find yourself dead in the water and far out to sea, hungry as a bum and thirsty as hell. And tired. Bone weary. Exhausted. The wind is out of your sail. That's when you start hearing voices in the still air - of mermaids calling you out - and they're singing the Same. Danged. Song. The one with your name in it. The Song with the Heavenly Strains and the haunting refrain that enticed you go overboard in the first place - Perfect Love. Perfect Love. Just believe... take a chance...
Arise and come, and come to me.
The moon is soft upon the sea.
Oh come and lose yourself in me
And I will be the air you breathe.
A cloak of green, a crown of foam
If you will call the ocean home.
A salt perfume, a throne of pearl
If you will sail beyond the world.
Arise and come...
Come to me...
And by Jove, you're drawn to it! And for some ungodly (or is it?) reason you want to jump ship. Again!
Despite it all, The Dream Remains The Same! Go figure! What's up with that?
Well, that's how my travelogue reads so far. I'd like to read one that hasn't. One that isn't boring, that won't put me to sleep. I don't want to go to sleep. I want to wake up. And smell the roses. Or the stinky albatrosses. Either way, I want Real. I know how to deal with real. I think. I know I don't know how to deal with lies and pretense. Even and maybe especially pretty little lies - all the hope-sos and wishful, magical thinking. My own, especially. They're what makes me truly crazy. They skirt around the danger zone, and we don't talk about it later. They don't face the fears. So they disconnect even more. And so make me even more afraid. More crazy. That undying and incorruptible Hope makes me crazy, too, for sure - but not like that. So far, anyway. It kills me, as perfect love is wont to do, but softly. With His Song. But the lies and the ghosts - they just wreck it.
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
Trouble is, sometimes, when I'm especially hungry or thirsty, disconnected, afraid I'm going crazy, or just plain afraid, those damned pretty lies sound so hopeful, so hope inspiring... That's when I need extra eyes, others' eyes, for perspective, and proportion, for discernment. And even still the Draw, the Main Attraction which all attractions suggest and intimate, that Big Draw that draws everything and everyone upward and unto Itself as we dance along the event horizon of His Eye (hey, sounds more spicey than shuffle along this mortal coil!), continues apace. And me, I'm sucked into the undertoad for yet another go-round. I'm afraid so. Woe is me. Woe. I am undone. Or done in. Or just plain done.
But no. Like the Missionary to the Headhunters said while waist deep in the big soup pot plaintively asserted, "I'm not done yet!" When the pot gets hot enough, the Missionary will recognize he's a cannibal, too - a Maneater. His first communion.
Anyway, be that as it may - all that to say this: Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because *as he is, so are we in this world*.
Which is to say - absurdly, astonishingly - it's all good. And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
So I'm thinkin', maybe let's have another look at these nifty little oar dealies. And maybe take a another good long look at our shipmates, sans oar-in-the-moley-faces. And a good long listen. And definitely another look at the Mercy. A good, long gaze at that strange yet familiar Face. Maybe then we could start rowing in Eden a bit more in sync? Perhaps even tack ourselves into a sweeter breeze (or is it a whirlpool, the swirling eddies created by all the cross-currents?) that might give us dumsnut wannabe Ancient Mariners (with our handy-dandy but stoopid-ijit cross-bows) a chance of blowing this crazy pop-stand and getting out of Dodge? Maybe even remembering our First Love. Maybe. Have to hope for a second wind. What else can a Body do in such a straight?
I'm thinking about the church, here, too. It's all connected. Despite how it looks at first glance. Even so, lash me to your Mast, Sailor Man. Trust the process. Trust the flow. Like I have a clue what that means. But I'll keep a wet finger aloft.
Thursday, November 23, 2006
Happy Thanksgiving
Because I'd heard the rest of the Story, I couldn't be really happy and thankful on Thanksgiving Day. On the contrary, there was a part of me that became really sad and really angry every fourth Thursday in November, whenever I remembered the Story.
But today I'm happier and more thankful than I am other days, because I heard one particular person is happy and thankful today, even in the midst of many days of much sadness and much anger.
I thank her for that. And I'm thankful for her. And that she lived to tell her Story. May her tribe increase. And may her Story become part of ours and our childrens'. Because it is.
This song/prayer (that's become part of our Thanksgiving Day tradition as kind of a carol) seems fitting:
Counterclockwise Circle Dance (Ly-O-Lay Ale Loya)
But today I'm happier and more thankful than I am other days, because I heard one particular person is happy and thankful today, even in the midst of many days of much sadness and much anger.
I thank her for that. And I'm thankful for her. And that she lived to tell her Story. May her tribe increase. And may her Story become part of ours and our childrens'. Because it is.
This song/prayer (that's become part of our Thanksgiving Day tradition as kind of a carol) seems fitting:
Counterclockwise Circle Dance (Ly-O-Lay Ale Loya)
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Help her
Like Yossarian said, "I'm the bombardier, I'm all right."
Whenever I pay a little attention, I hear the voice of Dobbs:
Then help HER, help HER!
Heard it again this morning:
Save Nazanin
Whenever I pay a little attention, I hear the voice of Dobbs:
Then help HER, help HER!
Heard it again this morning:
Save Nazanin
Friday, May 26, 2006
Monday, May 22, 2006
It's getting there
Hi folks.
Latest version of Text2GED is now here:
www.gedmagic.com/Text2GEDsetup.exe
It's not a zip file anymore, so no more clumsiness there. A big Thank You! to Jordon Russell and the good folks at Inno for his fancy little Setup Compliler.
Still getting reports that it's slow loading in XP. Is that true for you? Let me know if this latest version helps any. One of these days I'll break down and buy XP and see for myself. Need a couple customers first.
I'll be putting up a web site later this week at www.GEDmagic.com. As always, suggestions are most welcome! New news on my program(s) will be posted there from now on.
I'm thinking $18.99 is about right - and I won't be charging for upgrades. The shareware version will be fully functional except for one key feature - it won't create a GEDCOM file. You can save to a workfile, however, or multiple workfiles, but they aren't recogognizable to any Genealogy database program. Text2GED won't need to be reinstalled when its purchased, either. Entry of the correct Registration Key, which will be sent immediately upon receipt of a payment via paypal, is all that's required once it's installed. Pretty slick.
So have I missed anything? What's going on in the rest of the world? What's going on in yours?
Monday, March 20, 2006
Hey! Free Program!
Hi folks.
How's it going?
I've been sequestered away for the last couple months working on my genealogy program. Had a couple job interviews over the last couple weeks, but still the same old same-old - it's been five years, now! Unbelievable.
But I have high hopes - I think this program is going to fly. It's one I've been working on it for over three years now, and it's just gotten bigger and bigger - I keep thinking of cool new features to add to it. But last December I hit a wall - scope creep got to me - it was just too much. It had gotten up there to compete with the big guys - Family Tree Maker, Legacy, AFT, and PAF (hard to compete with a free program!). But I'm a one-guy shop - it just got to be too much. I was daunted. So to encourage this old shoe-maker to get back to his last, I promised myself I'd nip the scope creep in the bud and stop with the add-ons - after I add just one more really cool feature that just HAD to be in there (because absolutely NO one else had it) - namely, a glorified copy/paste function that would speed up data entry from genealogy websites by a factor of about 1000.
And it was about that time I heard Marilyn's voice saying, "Chunk it down, Ricky!"
And I thought, you know? This feature is just so cool it could stand alone all by itself. I can do that, and have it ready to go in a couple months. So let's! And then I thought, you know? I could even do that with the rest of the cool features. Instead of providing one great big program full of tools, I could make those tools available seperately - like snap-ons. And that was just the ticket. I've been running with that epiphany ever since, and now the first of the bunch is ready for Beta testing, with a couple more following shortly.
So. Have a free program!
Due to present budget constraints I can't offer much more than that at the moment, but next year, who knows. Hey, I'd hire you in a heartbeat!
You can download the zipped install program from here:
http://www.gentlespirit.com/Rick/Text2GED.zip
And the install instructions and mini-manual here:
http://www.gentlespirit.com/Rick/Text2GEDminiManual.doc
I'll be leaving for Florida tomorrow morning. My sister Karen and I will be there for a week, visiting our dad. Probably have a story to tell when I get back on the 28th.
See you around the word-world. Wish me luck?
~Ricky
How's it going?
I've been sequestered away for the last couple months working on my genealogy program. Had a couple job interviews over the last couple weeks, but still the same old same-old - it's been five years, now! Unbelievable.
But I have high hopes - I think this program is going to fly. It's one I've been working on it for over three years now, and it's just gotten bigger and bigger - I keep thinking of cool new features to add to it. But last December I hit a wall - scope creep got to me - it was just too much. It had gotten up there to compete with the big guys - Family Tree Maker, Legacy, AFT, and PAF (hard to compete with a free program!). But I'm a one-guy shop - it just got to be too much. I was daunted. So to encourage this old shoe-maker to get back to his last, I promised myself I'd nip the scope creep in the bud and stop with the add-ons - after I add just one more really cool feature that just HAD to be in there (because absolutely NO one else had it) - namely, a glorified copy/paste function that would speed up data entry from genealogy websites by a factor of about 1000.
And it was about that time I heard Marilyn's voice saying, "Chunk it down, Ricky!"
And I thought, you know? This feature is just so cool it could stand alone all by itself. I can do that, and have it ready to go in a couple months. So let's! And then I thought, you know? I could even do that with the rest of the cool features. Instead of providing one great big program full of tools, I could make those tools available seperately - like snap-ons. And that was just the ticket. I've been running with that epiphany ever since, and now the first of the bunch is ready for Beta testing, with a couple more following shortly.
So. Have a free program!
Due to present budget constraints I can't offer much more than that at the moment, but next year, who knows. Hey, I'd hire you in a heartbeat!
You can download the zipped install program from here:
http://www.gentlespirit.com/Rick/Text2GED.zip
And the install instructions and mini-manual here:
http://www.gentlespirit.com/Rick/Text2GEDminiManual.doc
I'll be leaving for Florida tomorrow morning. My sister Karen and I will be there for a week, visiting our dad. Probably have a story to tell when I get back on the 28th.
See you around the word-world. Wish me luck?
~Ricky
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Day Dreaming
Read this from Brian McLaren today and thought of you:
The dream of God.
I frequently try to put the prayer of the kingdom (what we often call “The Lord’s Prayer”) into my own words so that I don’t just recite it on autopilot. But I often struggle with how to paraphrase the clause “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Since the language of “will” can take us down a trail of control, domination, and coercion, and since I don’t believe those ideas are in Jesus’ mind, I have looked for other words.
The Greek word that lies beneath our English word “will” can also be translated “wish.” But to say, “May your wish come true” sounds fairy tale-ish and creates other problems. But I have found the idea of “the dream of God for creation” does the job nicely. “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven” could thus be rendered, “May all your dreams for your creation come true.” This language suggests a more personal, less mechanistic relationship between God and our world. It would resonate, for example, with a mother who has great dreams for her child, or an artist who has great dreams for a novel or symphony he is creating.
The call to faith is the call to trust God and God’s dreams enough to realign our dreams with God’s, to dream our little dreams within God’s big dream. The call to receptivity is the call to continually receive God’s dreams—a process that seems to be a lifelong one. The call to baptism is the call to publicly identify with God’s dream and to disassociate with all competing isms or ideologies that claim to provide the ultimate dream (including nationalism, consumerism, hedonism, conservatism, liberalism, and so on). And the call to practice is the call to learn to live the way God dreams for us to live.
Rest of article...
Go ahead and dream big. And vicey-versey...
The dream of God.
I frequently try to put the prayer of the kingdom (what we often call “The Lord’s Prayer”) into my own words so that I don’t just recite it on autopilot. But I often struggle with how to paraphrase the clause “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Since the language of “will” can take us down a trail of control, domination, and coercion, and since I don’t believe those ideas are in Jesus’ mind, I have looked for other words.
The Greek word that lies beneath our English word “will” can also be translated “wish.” But to say, “May your wish come true” sounds fairy tale-ish and creates other problems. But I have found the idea of “the dream of God for creation” does the job nicely. “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven” could thus be rendered, “May all your dreams for your creation come true.” This language suggests a more personal, less mechanistic relationship between God and our world. It would resonate, for example, with a mother who has great dreams for her child, or an artist who has great dreams for a novel or symphony he is creating.
The call to faith is the call to trust God and God’s dreams enough to realign our dreams with God’s, to dream our little dreams within God’s big dream. The call to receptivity is the call to continually receive God’s dreams—a process that seems to be a lifelong one. The call to baptism is the call to publicly identify with God’s dream and to disassociate with all competing isms or ideologies that claim to provide the ultimate dream (including nationalism, consumerism, hedonism, conservatism, liberalism, and so on). And the call to practice is the call to learn to live the way God dreams for us to live.
Rest of article...
Go ahead and dream big. And vicey-versey...
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
smells just like I'm hungry
Just a bunch of jumbled thoughts that I think do fit somehow, but I can't find any glue at the moment.
-----
"How is it that in a world where all that is real is a particular and individual thing, the human mind is able to distribute the manifold of reality into classes, in which particular things are contained?"
"Who gets to define gots the power."
kategoreo - English: to charge with; accuse. Latin: predicament
"What's in a name? Plenty!"
"By a name
I know not how to tell thee who I am:
My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself,
Because it is an enemy to thee;
Had I it written, I would tear the word."
-----
What do we know when we know someone's name? Identity is one thing, but identification is another.
"Who do you say I am?"
"Say my name, say my name..."
"Smile when you say that, pardner!"
"And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field..."
My take on this naming business is that Adam gave each creature a name *individually* rather than according to kind or class. Adam gave them each their very own name, and their name was a gift as much as their relationship/connection with Adam was gift. The naming came out of Adam's priestly role of offering up each creature with love and delight. It was a different order of power. Each was named, *but not defined*. Not reduced to a word.
Not like we like to do with, say, clams. Poor clams. Not exactly an onomatopoetic identification. The ID "clam" hardly does clam-ness justice, does it. But we think we know clams. Seen one clam, seen them all. Poor clams, did I say? No, poor us. We seldom see actual individual clams. We have no names for individual clams. Even when we do the names miss the point. You know, like, "Let me introduce you to my pet clam, Clem! Say 'hi' to the folks, Clem!" His Clem-ness says, "Hi, dearies. I don'a gotsa no lira, so do'na put yur tax on'a me! Just enjoy me as I am in all'a my glory, thank a'you!"
I have to think back then the analogical correspondence between the word and the thing itself was a lot tighter; a lot more intimate. The name intimated so much more of the named. And the namer. Not like now.
Could we get that back? The whole creation groans for it, I think. I know I do. Don't you?
What's in a name? Plenty. A clam by any other name would still smell pretty fishy.
"And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch."
Who gave the disciples their new name, anyway? Did the disciples name themselves? Or did the Antiochian community get to name them? I think others named them, and it stuck. So we're stuck with it too?
What's identification for, anyway? Cognitive shorthand? What is the relationship/connection between what they were called and who they were? Which defined which? And what *was* the definition of Christian, then? Whose was it? What did that word/name "Christian" mean? Believer/follower of Christ? A Christ-one? Did the name do the subject justice? As a genus? As a specie? As an individual? As a family? Did anyone do the name justice? Has anyone?
So what does "Christian" mean now? A believer/follower of Jesus? What's the defining characteristic, now, that qualifies someone for that name/title these days? These post-Chalcedon, post-Dort, post-Trent, post-Chicago, post-modern days? Who gets to say? Who knows? And what difference does it make, anymore? And for whose sake?
A Christian by any other name would still not smell like a clam. Or a rose, for that matter. What *does* a Christian smell like, anyway? Teen Spirit?
Who I am is one thing. *Whose* I am is another. Whose *you* think I am is yet another. Who do you say that I am? Who do I smell like to you? Are you sure you got a good whiff? Here... come a little closer... wait, not too close. Yeah... come closer a little further away. Because it matters to me. Because you matter.
Say my name, say my name... You priest me. One way or the other. It's your calling. And I you. It's our mutual oblation, our heave offering on the one hand and our thank offering on the other, unto the Name that is above every name who calls us each by name, and gives us his own name (whatever that means), whose Name is as ointment poured forth. Like the rest of us. We all matter.
"To be, or not to be?"
To be? Or to do?
Do-be do-be do...
Just don't call me late for dinner. It smells very good. So do you.
Fe-fi-fo-fum...
Until the day when the Accuser is cast down...
Got glue?
Always, all ways yours,
~His Ricky-ness
Friday, January 13, 2006
Sunday, January 01, 2006
Auld Lang Syne
Happy New Year, my dears!
:*
And ther's a hand, my trusty friend,
And gie's a hand o' thine;
We'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
Friday, December 30, 2005
Good Grief
I heard someone say awhile back that if you really have passion for someone, and they hurt you, as we've hurt God, there's no such thing as "simple forgiveness" (as in, why couldn't God just forgive, without the cross?) They said they were thinking that all that blood and agony is exactly what it looks like when God forgives.
:(
Wow. Yeah.
I don't know. Advent isn't even over and already I'm into Lent. My circadian rhythm's out of whack - why not the other? This is what's coming my way these days - may as well go with the flow.
I need to get beneath the anger and just stay with the grief as long as it takes, I think. Unresolved grief keeps us forever children. That's been true in my case. So what do I make of the whole deal in the light of Christ?Yeah, I want to go there. It's about time.
I've always been gut-struck by that part of the story, just after his supposedly triumphal entry into Jerusalem and after the crowds have dispersed, where we see Jesus weeping as he beheld the city (Lk 19:41). Rather jarring sequence of events, seems to me.
Palm Sunday is a sad day for the Man of Sorrows. And for good reason. I'm thinking he probably knew the same crowd would be out the following Friday singing a different song. Unrequitted love will break your heart like nothing else. Saddest story in the book. But hearing the songs of praises on their lips - oh how sweet the sound! - but you know better? That'd make anyone absolutely crazy! I can't help but notice he got real irritable right after that - he cursed a fig tree; went postal in the temple. Sounds like a classic guy thing - what I know of anger it often serves as a mask for fear or shame, and even more often for grief. Mix in a little jealousy there and you get fireworks. My take on it is what we're seeing is Jesus coming to terms with the reality of the situation there, and it didn't sit well with him at all. On Thursday he spent a pensive evening with just his closest disciples, but even then the coming betrayals and denials hung over him like a shroud. And that night in Gethsemene, alone with God, sweating blood like tears... even still, he was most gracious that night, Who on the very night he was betrayed broke bread, and said, Take. Eat. This is my body, broken for you... (not at all classic, but rather classy, I'd say).
You've heard the theories, I'm sure. It's said that what he wrestled with there in the garden that night was the coming separation from his Father; or worse, suffering the full force of God's unmitigated wrath that was millennia in the brewing and filling up to overflow. (You know, "Habakkuks oft cited but hasty assertion that God is of purer eyes than to look upon sin...") I don't know about that. Yeah, he did cry out, "My God my God why hast thou forsaken me!" Maybe his Father's rejection was something he wrestled mighily with before accepting, I don't know. Who does. What I'm thinking though is that it's just as possible what he wrestled mightily with there in the garden was having to face up to and endure to the dregs the bald-faced straight-up unmitigated rejection - a total and ultimate rejection with extreme prejudice - of his own people; the people he nevertheless loved so passionately, so dearly, so impossibly. I'm sure he suspected, but I wonder if, like us, he'd rather not go all the way into that awful truth. I don't think Jesus told himself pretty little lies - I think he knew the score.
Can you imagine the torment? Talk about exquisite.
I have to wonder what correlation there may be between his being "despised and rejected of men" and his godforsakenness there at the very end.
"We esteemed him not."
:(
He was in the world
The world was made by him
And the world knew him not.
He came unto his own
And his own
received him
not.
Lord have mercy.
Yes, have mercy. Because I see a correlation - here, now. I'm hooked. Caught in the net. Afraid to ask what's next. Not sure I really want to know.
Just stay with the grief as long as it takes.
Eat the pain. Eat it! Drink all of it. It'll be okay.
Sunday, December 18, 2005
What do you expect?
Someone reminded me out of the blue today that Christmas/Advent is the "irrational season".
Have you heard this from Madeline L'Engle? I hadn't.
This is the irrational season
When love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason,
There'd have been no room for the child.
That sounds rather dangerous to me for some reason. And at the same time so hopeful and even exhilarating. Go figure.
What do I expect in this pregnant time? Besides the usual ambivalence? In a word, I expect the worst. I do, dang me.
What I *hope* for in this time is that the worst will turn out to be be the best, nevertheless.
For the present, between that expectation and this hope, I labor along in ambivalence. I have especially mixed feelings about this particular notion that's borne out in the following rather poignant quote which accompanied the one above when I googled on the topic, juxtapositioned just so marvelously:
Loving the Wrong Person
We’re all seeking that special person who is right for us. But if you’ve been through enough relationships, you begin to suspect there’s no right person, just different flavors of wrong. Why is this? Because you yourself are wrong in some way, and you seek out partners who are wrong in some complementary way. But it takes a lot of living to grow fully into your own wrongness. It isn’t until you finally run up against your deepest demons, your unsolvable problems – the ones that make you truly who you are – that you’re ready to find a life-long mate. Only then do you finally know what you’re looking for. You’re looking for the wrong person. But not just any wrong person: the right wrong person – someone you lovingly gaze upon and think, “This is the problem I want to have.”
But... And? So? Yes, but. I do hope for the best.
Because I can't help but notice the signs.
I keep being reminded (thanks be to God in Christ in you Bob, and you Jeanne, and you Laura, and all of you, as well) about the reason for the season - whenever I see the extra-ordinary become ordinary and the ordinary become extra-ordinary - in all the lovely little gestures and all the humble but significant gifts, given and received. And even better, and closer to home, whenever I see how when things don't go according to plan, at all, but turn out in the end to be better than either if us had barely dared dream, much less expect.
So I wonder what's being birthed in me - in us - these holy days. Something is indeed stirring. Has been for awhile now. I see such beauty all around us, all the precious babes born into the world, into this little corner, and I wonder; will it be so with me and mine? Will anyone call me blessed? Will I?
What will be will be. Let it be. Tell me once more that all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well - remind me Whose I am. I will and do believe you. I see it in you...
And I rejoice. And so I hope.
But I haven't a clue what specifically to expect. It's bigger than me. I do expect it'll be different. And also the same. Isn't that how it works? Even from the beginning? Is now? And ever shall be?
Is that not very Christ? To be expected?
I s'pect so.
The presents are under the tree. And around and about, as well.
I wish you all the blessed best - the best that you are and have been for me.
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