Jesus: Spun or Unleashed?
O Lover, The current morass of our society’s use and abuse of religion, Jesus in particular, has of late been nudging me toward a revisit to Alfie’s question “What’s it all about?” In our...
Prayers in Winter Blog
Waylaid in the Pocket Garden of Vite
[“(B)ecause God’s goodness could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, God produced many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied...
In Muted Praise of Deconstruction
O Lover, In this my late autumn assorted oppositional tensions (e.g., paradoxes and dialectics, ironies and seeming oxymorons) are surfacing with greater frequency. In retrospect, life is shown to be an oscillation between negation...
The “Bending of the Grasses” and Beyond
[“I did not see God, for that would have blinded me, but I saw the bending of the grasses at the passing of the hem of His garments” (Sophy Burnham, b. 1936).] O Lover,...
Etty Hillesum on Attentive Listening
[Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943. (Complete and Unabridged; K. Smelik, ed., A. Pomerans, trans.). Eerdmans, 2002.] O Lover, In these chaotic days I have found myself exploring as for the first...
Musings on a Shift
[“The whole earth is full of (Your) glory” (Is 6:3).] O Lover, Are not major paradigm shifts glimpsed primarily in retrospect after the tumult has peaked and a measure of perspective gained? Is this...
A Place Called Bethel
[“Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.’ He was terrified and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none...
On Holding and Folding
[“Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were younger, you used to gird (‘dress’) yourself and walk wherever you wished; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands and someone...
Confession
O Lover, I confess that I have moments when I wonder whether You and/or I are an illusion; whether religion and spirituality are mere human projections fueled by fear of finitude in general, mortality...
On Death and Dying
O Lover, I still recall the gist of musings long ago by a colleague of mine in the context of a graduate student palaver: “I am more at peace with the certainty of my...
Hodie Revisited
O Lover, In last week’s post pondering Your presence decades ago in the hearing of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Hodie Christus natus Est I failed to accentuate a theme which has since refused to go...