Image: “Sky,” by Mike Shell
…Nonaligned faith and practice in the present
There is no way to
move through life except
to
lift your foot from
where it was
and
place it
farther
ahead.
Image: “Giacomond,” by Quint Buchholz (1984) [Quibu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via
…Until this morning I was
fixed
on boxing things
collected over decades.
Fragile, heavy, old, purchased, given,
all stuff from other moments.
…
There isn’t really an end
to this.
Coasting forward or
drifting sideways or back,
We never reach a goal.
It’s a matter of equilibrium,
homeostasis.
It’s not
a matter of
getting to enlightenment,
Stop wasting
time
being
consciousness.
“You”
does not
exist.
It is a path
of illusory
linear time
through the
sphere
of
Creation
which
is
all
at
“We Are All Called to Be ‘Heroes’,” by Elam D. Jones (Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Autumn/Winter 2020, 19-21)
In “We Are All Called to Be ‘Heroes’,” Elam D. Jones explains why he is wary of the popular pandemic practice of calling essential workers “heroes.”
…I have come to understand that the label “hero” and how it has been employed in the United States to refer to essential workers not only generates complicated and ambiguous feelings
Never mind the endless cycling
of what we call news
ensorcelling tales of political theater,
social distress, and un-
natural disasters
things happening
elsewhere.
We are in the salutary midst
of the fall.
What is close
is real.
Think of children
now schooled
Continuing my series on Stringfellow’s An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973).
When William Stringfellow uses the biblical language of the Book of Revelation, he is not referring to beings or events of some future supernatural “end time.” He is using it—as did Revelation’s author and first audience—to refer poetically to things of this present world, this mortal human world.
Chapter 4 is “Stratagems of the demonic powers.” The demonic denies
…From my Facebook post this morning .
It is quite normal for human beings to claim “religions” as cultural identities. Normal we say “I am a Jew” or “I am a Sikh,” meaning that we belong to people of the Jewish or Sikh culture, those who subscribe not just to the systems of “right belief” and “right behavior” of those “religions.”
All of this is because THE most important social reality for human animals is that they are hardwired
…