My tolerance for idiots is extremely low these days. I used to have some immunity built up, but obviously, there’s a new strain out there.
We become what we see
pornographic gaze vs sacramental gaze
This vision is “sacramental” as we come to behold invisible, spiritual truths shining though material reality. Proper Christian vision participates in a “sacramental ontology,” where we see a world “charged with the grandeur of God.” The sacramental gaze creates a sacred encounter. To see with the eyes of the heart incarnates a relation of love.
The pornographic gaze is greedy, consumptive, and objectifying. The pornographic gaze is iconoclastic perception, a form of perceptual violence, as it rips the sacred from the material. In the thought of Martin Buber, the pornographic gaze creates an objectifying and deadening I-It relation with the world. By contrast, the sacramental gaze beholds an I-Thou relation, a meeting with a holy other.
to “make a covenant with my eyes” is, rather, learning to envision the world correctly, rejecting an I-It relation for an I-Thou relation, as we gaze at each other. In rejecting the pornographic gaze in favor of the sacramental gaze, we come to see the world with the eyes of our heart.
I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, Ephesians 1:18
http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2022/08/a-covenant-with-my-eyes-part-3-seeing.html
The Presence of God
Adapted from Walter Brueggemann’s description of Freedom,
Living Toward a Vision page 41
There is something hidden and mysterious about the Presence of God. It is like manna in that it is always a gift given, and never a product controlled and understood. Like manna, it is not something that cam be stored up and taken for granted, because then it turns sour and we don’t have it anymore. It states the heart of our faith and our greatest temptation. : Yet at the same time those who do not care for, nurture, and celebrate God’s Presence when it is given are likely not to enjoy it very long.
Avoiding Death
When we avoid thoughts of death, we unconsciously assume that tomorrow will look a lot like today, so we can do tomorrow what we could do today. But when we focus on death, that increases the stakes at play in the present, and clarifies what we should do with our time.
If you insist on ignoring your own demise, you are likely to make decisions that cause you to sleepwalk through life. You may not be dead yet, but you’re not fully alive either.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/05/death-memento-mori-happiness/674158/
Is pluralism a Christian ethic ?
Pluralists seek to replace the demonizing, demeaning and dividing ethos with one that encourages respect, relationships and cooperation. Pluralists believe that people’s identities are complex and shifting, that most human beings shouldn’t be divided into good/evil categories, that we become wise as we enter into many different points of view. Patel says that universities shouldn’t be battlefields but potluck dinners, where all guests bring their own cuisines to the common table.
David Brooks
Prayer is the work
…the battle is fought in prayer. We don’t pray for the battle. Prayer is the battle. Prayer is the place where justification and sanctification happen., An old preacher told me once that he really began to understand “justification” when he was working construction one summer. As he would place a stud in the wall of the home they were building, either he or his partner would have to step off and hold up a plum line to make sure the stud was straight. One day, he said, he finally understood this was what the Spirit was doing to him in prayer. The Spirit would hold up the plum line of Christ against his life and then hammer him straight in the places he didn’t line up with Jesus.
When we leave our prayers, we should be totally aligned with what God is doing in us and through us. You can’t do that in a few minutes a day. That takes a while.
Mike Glenn
Love your enemies
…brain scans show how powerfully social identity can shape our emotional response to situations. …
For example, if someone sees a comrade in pain — a fellow member of one’s group — the brain will react with empathy. “My brain would simulate the suffering of the other person by reactivating how I feel when I am feeling bad,” Klimecki explains.
But, instead, if it is an adversary experiencing pain, not only is the same empathetic region of the brain not as active, she says, “we also sometimes see more activation related to schadenfreude or malicious joy.”
Olga Klimecki, a neurology researcher, via Scot Mknight
the biggest threat to faith
“clean hands and a pure heart” Ps 24
…the biggest threat to faith in the modern world is what I call “the mystical-to-moral shift.” We believe that goodness is the goal of faith, rather than seeking God. This moralization and politicization of faith, given how politics is increasingly becoming an arena of moral identity and performance, instrumentalizes God and the life of faith. God becomes a tool to become good, faith an instrument for a political agenda, church a technique for moral self-improvement.
Phrased differently, God is perceived as means and goodness as the end. We believe in God, go to church, pray, read our Bibles, follow the Golden Rule all in order to become a good person, increasingly a politically inflected vision of a good person.
This instrumentalizing of faith undermines faith because, as we all know, you can be good without God. And you don’t need to believe in God to vote well. There are many non-religious ways to become a good person or subscribe to the proper politics. And if you don’t need God, faith or church to be good, well, what’s the point? If you can get to the end by other means, God, as a moral or political tool, can be left behind.
Richard Beck
Islamification of the faith
Islamification of the faith. I have written before of the influence of Islam on the notion of Sola Scriptura. Christianity, viewed as essentially an act of submission to God through Christ, is not Christianity. It is a Christianized Islam. It’s useful. It need have none of the problems concomitant with a genuine historical Church. It is quite portable and can be kept entirely private, offering no disturbance to the structures and agreements of the secular world. Individual Christians are never a problem for the world. It’s only when two or three of them gather together that they become dangerous.
Fr Stephen Freeman
Faith
“faith.” We often assume that the Greek word pistis means something thin, as in “belief.” To have “faith” is to “believe.”
But pistis (faith) means something much more than “belief.” Pistis is better translated as fidelity, faithfulness, loyalty, and allegiance. To have faith means to keep faith — to hold fast, to endure, to remain, to stay, to never falter or betray. Faith is an inseverable bond. An unbreakable promise. An unshakable commitment. An unwavering loyalty. Faith is courage, endurance, and steely resolve. Faith is the blood of the martyrs.
Another way to think about this, especially faith-as-allegiance, is that, in the Biblical imagination, there is no space for free moral agency. Every space has a Power or a Lord. The only option before you, therefore, is to whom you will swear allegiance. As Bob Dylan sang, “You’ve gotta serve somebody.”
This is why the opposite of faith isn’t “unbelief” but idolatry — betraying your love, breaking your promise, serving another lord. And again, the issue of idolatry isn’t here a mental game, a game of “believing” in this or that. Idolatry, says the theologian William Cavanaugh, is less about your metaphysical or ontological beliefs than a lifestyle that betrays your fundamental allegiances:
Richard Beck
Only in kentucky
…state law allows for secret recordings as long as one party is aware of it …
Compassionate Heart
– definition: A person who is standing in snow with the temperature at 12 degrees who feels compassion for those who are in Florida standing in the rain with the temperature at 35 degrees.
Tradition
Our humanity is a tradition. I can only learn what it is to be a human being from another human being, someone who has successfully fulfilled that reality. Animals are no different. Birds do not suddenly fly – their flight is traditioned to them. Human beings learn to walk in a traditioned manner as well. Your computer or your phone will not teach you how to be a human being.
Fr Stephen Freeman
Seduction of Crowds
the seduction of crowds is a hunger for transcendence. Getting swept up in a group can be ecstatic, temporarily filling the hole in your soul. But such transcendence is temporary, addictive, and prone to corruption. Belonging to the group becomes more important than the reason the group was created in the first place.
Jonah Goldberg
View from the front porch
Happy Thanksgiving
Gratitude
Anne Lamott writes of the exponential flow of gratitude in our lives:
Saying and meaning “Thanks” leads to a crazy thought: What more can I give? We take the action first, by giving—and then the insight follows, that this fills us. Sin is not the adult bookstore on the corner. It is the hard heart, the lack of generosity, and all the isms, racism and sexism and so forth. But is there a crack where a ribbon of light might get in, might sneak past all the roadblocks and piles of stones, mental and emotional and cultural?…
How can something so simple be so profound, letting others go first, in traffic or in line at Starbucks, and even if no one cares or notices? Because for the most part, people won’t care—they’re late, they haven’t heard back from their new boyfriend, or they’re fixated on the stock market. And they won’t notice that you let them go ahead of you.
They take it as their due.
But you’ll know. And it can change your whole day, which could be a way to change your whole life. There really is only today, although luckily that is also the eternal now. And maybe one person in the car in the lane next to you or in line at the bank or at your kid’s baseball game will notice your casual generosity and will be touched, lifted, encouraged—in other words, slightly changed for the better—and later will let someone else go first. And this will be quantum.
The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-obsessed madness to a spiritual awakening. Gratitude is peace.
STILL ON THE JOURNEY