Progress ?
On October 22, 2020, the United States was averaging, per The New York Times, about 62,000 new COVID-19 cases, 45,700 hospitalizations, and 800 new COVID-19 deaths per day in what was the early stages of the country’s third wave that would go on to kill hundreds of thousands of people. One year later, all three of those figures are worse: 76,500, 57,700, and 1,500 as of Wednesday, respectively.
What’s wrong with America? bottled water!
Susan McWilliams’ observation that 2006 marked a terrible turn in American civic life. That was the year when Americans started drinking bottled water more than beer. “Why is this important?” she asked. “It’s important because beer is a socially oriented beverage, and bottled water is a privately oriented one.” Beer commercials have happy fun people doing stuff together. Bottled water commercials, meanwhile, “tend to include lone individuals climbing things and running around by themselves, usually on a beach at sunrise—even though they are not being chased.”
Jonah Goldberg
Surrender
In A Return to Love, Marianne Williamson says, “Until your knees finally hit the floor, you’re just playing at life, and on some level you’re scared because you know you’re just playing. The moment of surrender is not when life is over. It’s when it begins.” [1] It is entirely cliché, but this was exactly my experience. The moment I finally let my knees hit the floor was when I finally stopped playing at life, and every bit of good that’s come to me since then stems from this reversal of opinion on surrender.
Surrender is the strongest, most subversive thing you can do in this world. It takes strength to admit you are weak, bravery to show you are vulnerable, courage to ask for help. It’s also not a one-time gig; you don’t just do it once and move on. It’s a way of existing, a balancing act. For me, it looks like this: I pick up the baton and I run as far as I can, and I hand it over when I’m out of breath. Or actually maybe it’s like: I’m running with the baton, but the Universe is holding on to the other half of it, and we have an agreement that I’ll figure out the parts I can and hand over the parts I can’t.
Holly Whitaker via Richard Rohr
How to see
At its best, Western Christianity is dynamic and outflowing. But the downside is that this entrepreneurial instinct may have caused it to be subsumed by culture instead of transforming culture at any deep level. In our arrogance and ignorance, we also totally trampled on the cultures we entered. We became a formal and efficient religion that felt that its job was to tell people what to see instead ofhow to see.
Richard Rohr
I can do nothing
I can recall years ago that in my very first confession as an Orthodox Christian, the priest told me to pray: “Apart from You, I can do nothing.” I did, but I misunderstood it for many years. My twist was quite subtle. When I prayed this I meant, “I can’t do anything without your help.” This is somehow not the same as “I can do nothing.” The first kept directing my attention to the “anything” I could do if God helped me. However, my attention needed to be on the “nothing.” It is our emptiness and failure that bring us face-to-face with our shame, and in that moment, face-to-face with the God who alone can truly cover our shame and comfort us.
Fr Stephen Freeman
Elderly
Earlier today, a friend posted on Facebook about an experience he’d just had on the Upper West Side of Manhattan: “I heard a guy who looked to be in his 20s say that it’s not a big deal cause the elderly are gonna die anyway. Then he and his friend laughed … Maybe I’m lucky that I had awesome grandparents and maybe this guy didn’t but what is wrong with people???”
What does it say about our society that people think of the elderly so dismissively—and moreover, that they feel no shame about expressing such thoughts publicly? I find myself wondering whether this colossal moral failure is exacerbated by the most troubled parts of our cultural and economic life. When people are measured and valued by their economic productivity, it is easy to treat people whose most economically productive days have passed as, well, worthless.
From a religious perspective, if there is one thing we ought to teach our children, it is that our worth as human beings does not depend on or derive from what we do or accomplish or produce; we are, each of us, infinitely valuable just because we are created in the image of God. We mattered before we were old enough to be economically productive, and we will go on mattering even after we cease to be economically productive.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/respect-old/607864/
Friendship precedes fellowship
…friendship precedes fellowship. Yes, they want fellowship but they have big doubts sitting in a nice chair on Sunday in silence (or some singing or saying words from the liturgy) can legitimately be called fellowship. And if it doesn’t start with friendship it can never be fellowship.
Scot McKnight
Kate Durie 1950-2021
Kate’s Christian faith was never based on already found answers. Her mind was too sharp, her mood more interrogative than declarative. She had grown beyond the various iterations of Christian faith too ready to settle for certainty, and too impatient of mystery, too worried about not knowing. In the theological sense Kate loved mystery, and refused steadfastly to reduce God to manageable proportions or propositions. She trusted the humanity of Jesus, his tears and his anger, his compassion and patience, the sheer gratuitous fun of turning water into the best ever wine. She could entrust herself to the Lord of all faith, whose strong hands were skilled at the plane and the lathe – Christ, the master carpenter, using those tools that shape and form us towards Christlikeness.
Jim Gordon
The problem with our lives is that we cannot solve them. We can only live them.
Kate Bowler
View from the front porch
Fall is waning and temperatures are falling. We are preparing to flee to Florida for three months. Next time I write it will be a view from the lanai. For whatever reason, blogging has been a challenge since my stay in the hospital. My recovery is going well but writing is lagging behind. It is not clear why that is. I suspect it is related to the trauma I experienced and will improve with time.
Happy Thanksgiving.
