My friend Reverend Bob Gallier died this morning, after a long illness. Bob taught history in high school and was pastor of the Emmaus Baptist Church in Quinton, VA, before me. He was a prince. Unlike many former pastors, he supported and blessed me in every way he could. I am glad now that God has unknotted the sorrows in his life. Rest in peace, my brother.
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Farewell
Thursday, March 11th, 2010Lady Wonky
Monday, March 8th, 2010My laptop display is acting wonky, a technical term of the Geek Squad, and it’ll be a month before somebody can come out to fix it. So I am condemned to use my old desktop, Stonehenge era dinosaur. But first I had to unclutter the hard drive, so I could get a minimal operating speed. It’s incredible how much stuff gets stashed on a computer, and never taken off. Oh well.
I hope I haven’t uninstalled something essential. We’ll find out soon enough, I guess.
At the moment, in a V position, with a book beneath the keyboard—not me, my laptop!—I’ve got a clear display.
I’ve gotten interested in St. Francis. Leonardo Boff’s Francis of Assisi is a philosophical tour de force, which I’m reading slowly and humbly. But to get the life of Francis I’ll have to go back to G.K. Chesterton’s, and via Internet the very earliest biographies of Celano and Bonaventure. Whoopee!
Poverty is a wonky computer. Hmm! Wonder if Francis would agree.
The continuinjg incarnation
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010Wonderful DVD, I may have mentioned it: Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story. I also am reading Robert Ellsberg’s edited selections of her writings.
She hung out with Communists, anarchists, women’s movement activists prior to women’s having the vote. Not a likely candidate for sainthood. Had an abortion. But later, when she gave birth to her daughter Tamara, she was brought into the Catholic Church.
Never lost her love of the poor. Not until she met a French peasant-philosopher Peter Maurin did she know how to make the difference she sought in the world.
She found God in the poor. The incarnation continues, most specially (not exclusively) among the poor.
How does someone like me put her insights into action, I wonder. Both she and Gandhi used the written word effectively to build a movement.
Think what a blog could do, if God got hold of it, with the energy behind it of someone like her. I’m a shriveled up crippled never was has been. But surely God can use what little I have somehow to help Christianity in America heed God’s option for the poor.
The wrongs of capitalism are rampant in this country. Just think of the contortions Congress is going through simply to pass health care reform. If we can’t do something so clearly just as that, how can we expect to do anything?
Read the Bible in a Year
Monday, February 22nd, 2010I’m approaching the halfway point in my project of reading the Bible in a year. I have many empty hours to fill during the night and day, so there’s no virtue in my being so far ahead. My reading isn’t thoughtful, isn’t lectio divina; it’s more scanning. I’m also reading the Jewish Study Bible as well. I like the Jewish viewpoint, somewhat new for me, although I delved deep in grad school into Hebrew. I like having a balance of OT, NT, psalm and proverb in each reading, although the lectionary is better which unites readings thematically, theologically. During the enforced isolation of snow days, I have missed meeting with intrepid Bible reading partners. I’m hoping we’ll resume both Tuesday and Thursday groups this week.
No liberty
Monday, February 22nd, 2010The unemployment rate is now at 10 million, I think. Discouraged workers, no longer searching, pushes the numbers of workers up past 17 million? I’ve been reading Dorothy Day, Selected Writings. Also watched the Paulist DVD about her Entertaining Angels. We need a legion of such persons today. The social termites busily reduce the edifice of American liberty and justice to a shell. There is no liberty for the destitute, only the desperate struggle to find food, shelter, dignity, hope for another day.
The circle of life
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010When slighted by her husband, Nabal the Churl, Abigail advises David not to act out, take revenge. If only he’d listened to her counsel that day on the roof top before sleeping with Bathsheba and killing her husband!
If anyone should rise up to pursue you and to seek your life, the life of my lord shall be bound in the bundle of the living under the care of the LORD your God; but the lives of your enemies he shall sling out as from the hollow of a sling.
1 Sam 25:29 (NRSV)
If anyone stands in your way, if anyone tries to get you out of the way, Know this: Your God-honored life is tightly bound in the bundle of God-protected life; But the lives of your enemies will be hurled aside as a stone is thrown from a sling.
Message
The Jewish Study Bible equates this “bundle of the living” (only here) with the Book of Life.
I recently watched Casino Royale, and 007 learns to trust nobody. A kind of insanity the Western male is prone to admire—being the single stone flung from the hollow of the slingshot.
Personally, I’d rather be bound in the bundle of the living.
The labor of the olive
Sunday, February 14th, 2010Forgive me. It’s one of those dark nights. Outside what little moon there is reflects off snow that has blanketed the state for weeks.
Time to play everybody’s favorite: Seasonal Affective Disorder, a clinical label for the blues in the bleak midwinter, night of waking dread.
Like an impatient taylor, I pull out all the stitches of my life, in fantasy, redo them all, perfect. It’s a surefire symptom of the blue bleak devil’s arrival.
Several readings that I turn to when the blue bleak winter settles in, suffocating, silent:
Habakkuk 3, that poem replete with strands of ancient Canaanite myth:
Although the fig tree shall not blossom,
neither shall fruit be in the vines;
the labour of the olive shall fail,
and the fields shall yield no meat;
the flock shall be cut off from the fold,
and there shall be no herd in the stalls:
Yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will joy in the God of my salvation.
The LORD God is my strength,
and he will make my feet like hinds’ feet,
and he will make me to walk upon mine high places.Hab 3:17-19 (KJV)
If you’ll allow another quote, also extended. The setting is the dark night before the battle of Agincourt. Shakespeare’s Henry V. Harry wanders from camp to camp, speaking with his men.
The poor condemned English,
Like sacrifices, by their watchful fires
Sit patiently and inly ruminate
The morning’s danger, and their gesture sad
Investing lank-lean; cheeks and war-worn coats
Presenteth them unto the gazing moon
So many horrid ghosts. O now, who will behold
The royal captain of this ruin’d band
Walking from watch to watch, from tent to tent,
Let him cry ‘Praise and glory on his head!’
For forth he goes and visits all his host.
Bids them good morrow with a modest smile
And calls them brothers, friends and countrymen.
Upon his royal face there is no note
How dread an army hath enrounded him;
Nor doth he dedicate one jot of colour
Unto the weary and all-watched night,
But freshly looks and over-bears attaint
With cheerful semblance and sweet majesty;
That every wretch, pining and pale before,
Beholding him, plucks comfort from his looks:
A largess universal like the sun
His liberal eye doth give to every one,
Thawing cold fear, that mean and gentle all,
Behold, as may unworthiness define,
A little touch of Harry in the night.
Henry V. Act IV. Prologue.
I don’t know if Shakespeare meant it so, or if it’s blasphemous to think it, but I see described in these lines our brother Christ, who shoulders our griefs and bears our sorrows.
Blue devils—so says Tennessee Williams, that most eloquent of depressives in Night of the Iguana—respect endurance.
“The one who endures to the end shall be saved.” Matthew 10:22.
A prayer of the faithful from as early as the third century CE:
Let it be. Whatever You are birthing, let it be.
Symbols of Passover/Tabernacle/Promised Land
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010Since our Bible reading group didn’t meet tonight February 9 due to sleet, I’m sharing a quick look at a few of the most important symbols in Western history based on Exodus.
There are as many symbols as there are imaginations. But these have been affirmed through the centuries.
From Slavery to Freedom
Just as the Israelites left slavery for freedom, many others have. The English Pilgrims left religious repression for religious freedom in the New World. Sadly, they often became repressors. They viewed the Native Americans as cursed Canaanites and felt God gave them the land. Clearly, we need to rethink their theology.
Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries began a new exodus movement (Zionism), culminating in the state of Israel. But, again, it’s wrong to view Palestinians in the role of cursed Canaanites.
American blacks viewed the struggle for their freedom in the 1800s and for their civil rights in the 1900s as patterned after the exodus.
Salvation
Egypt symbolizes the state of being lost. The wilderness is the state of being saved, but fleshly, carnal-minded. The Promised Land is the state of being saved and Christ-minded, Spirit-filled.
Also, the wilderness is this world. The Jordan River is death. Palestine is heaven.
Passover
The Passover Lamb is Christ. Yeast removed from the household is sin. Blood on the doorpost is Christ’s blood, which saves us from death in sin.
Blood stands for life.
The writer of Hebrews examines the details of Passover carefully.
Like the remains of the animal sacrificed and carried outside the camp— Jesus died outside the city walls of Jerusalem.
When the veil in the Temple is torn from top to bottom (that is, supernaturally, not by humans), the separation between God and God’s people is removed. Now in Christ we have instant access to God.
From horror to hope
Friday, February 5th, 2010Joshua 7 tells the horrifying story of a man’s greed. The Hebrews devoted Jericho utterly to God—in other words, killed and destroyed everything.
But Achan stole some gold, silver and a robe for himself. He was found out. He, his family, his livestock, his possessions were stoned and burned. A pile of stones was heaped up as a marker.
Achor was a place like Pearl Harbor, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the World Trade Center.
But the prophets turned that around.
14 Therefore, I [the Lord] will now allure her [Israel],
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her.
15 From there I will give her her vineyards,
and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
There she shall respond as in the days of her youth,
as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.
Hosea 2:14-15 (NRSV)
9 I will bring forth descendants from Jacob,
and from Judah inheritors of my mountains;
my chosen shall inherit it,
and my servants shall settle there.
10 Sharon shall become a pasture for flocks,
and the Valley of Achor a place for herds to lie down,
for my people who have sought me.
Isaiah 65:9-10 (NRSV)
The Hebrew Bible was compiled and transmitted in its final stages by people who’d lost everything. The enemy had destroyed the Temple and exiled the people from their land.
But the scribes preserved the stories. They kept hope alive.
And in so doing they made our desolate places valleys of hope.
Becoming hacker-proof
Friday, February 5th, 2010It’s fixed now, but in the past couple days somebody hacked my blog so that it redirected people to the Chinese Sex Museum.
Hmmm?!
I don’t know what to think about that. i-youniverse.net (and related others) is a pretty basic little blog with a very small community of readers.
The name comes from Walter Kaufmann’s translation of Martin Buber’s classic I and Thou. Buber’s family wanted “I-thou” changed to “I-You,” because they correctly thought “thou” language out of date and counter to the intimate every-day-ness that Buber intended the I-thou relationship to represent.
The idea rocks: relate to all humans and all else in creation (even matter) as “subjects” to be respected and loved, NOT objects to be manipulated and used; in so doing, we relate as the Deity relates.
Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, a Catholic geologist, author of The Divine Milieu, believed even matter tingles with the Presence. The Chinese Sex Museum has nothing as exciting as Teilhard’s Hymn of the Universe, which you can read here.
How does it feel to be hacked?
I’ve been reading about how God wrote Ten Words on two stone tablets.
What would those be worth to a publisher?
A trillion bucks a word?
But Moses became so angry at the people’s idolatry, that he threw the tablets down and broke them.
Not hacking exactly, but equally destructive.
Jesus wrote, but in the sand. We don’t even know what. (John 8.6,8)
In comparison, the words in my blog don’t seem to be so important, do they?
I haven’t seen but have heard described how Tibetan monks will spend days making an elaborate, beautiful mandala of colored grains of sand. Then, after displaying their work, they sweep it away.
All things mortal so.
Except Love. The Love at the heart of creation which—who—we give many names.
Love is at the core of I-thou relations; it is the essence of an I-Youniverse, an I-You bond.
At moments of ecstacy, Buber imagined these bonds as though moving from Center to Periphery, forming a wheel of light.
John the Elder—the great author of much of the Johanine corpus (Revelation, Gospel of John, 1,2,3 John)—concluded one letter with:
“Although I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink; instead I hope to come to you and talk with you face to face, so that our joy may be complete.” 2 John 1:12 (NRSV)
The Apostle Paul described a kind of communication, “written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.” 2 Cor 3:3 (NRSV)
This is Love, the ultimate language.
Against such wondrous Love as this, no attack will succeed, no weapon prevail.
Photo by Msry Fran