We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
... already in the sixth century, one of the first great writers about hell, Pope Gregory the Great, ruefully acknowledged that the warning (of hell) is not very effective. And the long history of human behavior bears witness to the truth of this acknowledgment. The strictly instrumental use of hell finally boils down to a remark quoted by Voltaire: “My good friend, I no more believe in the eternity of hell than yourself; but recollect that it may be no bad thing, perhaps, for your servant, your tailor, and your lawyer to believe in it.”
Bach's Christmas Oratorio (1734) was written to be performed in 6 parts on 6 days, the first on Christmas Day at both St. Thomas' and St. Nicholas' Churches, Leipzig. (Complete, it runs 3 hours.)
Interestingly, it was what was termed a "parody," that is, a recycling of his previous music which had been written for secular purposes.
It's a centuries-old complaint that Christian morality detached from its religious roots can turn into a monstrous and terrifying thing. Take utilitarianism, take angry moralizers, take witch trials, take communism, and a hundred more examples of humanist evil.
Christianity is not primarily about morals and resistance to humanity's animal nature. I think Christ was clear about that in word and deed. I think he was clear about it, and that Paul elaborated on the religious truth that transcendent blessings like those of faith, mercy, love and kindness, hope and good cheer, are consequences nurtured through interactions with God and Christ through the Holy Spirit. Not rules, but secondary effects which can bind people together through God's graciousness and His tough sort of love.
As One Cosmos often explains, earthly gravity pulls us to the x-axis, the horizontal plane, of daily life and its struggles, but there is the vertical axis, the transcendent axis, available to us and for which we were born.
It's been part of my religious "journey" (I hate that smarmy expression) to come to realize that spiritual warfare is not Good vs Bad or Evil, but the inner battle of holding highest what is most high vs. the temptation to worship false idols. "I, me, mine," etc etc. Even pride in virtue is a false idol - it is about Self Love.
"Stop that, Bird Dog! No more preaching! You ain't no eddicated Preacher!" Well, ok, but Advent is our chance to be pregnant, in a spiritual sense, with holiness, and a time to have a dramatic chance to feel reborn ourselves as naked babies. That's the story of A Christmas Carol.
Matthew 18:2
2 He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. 3 And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Happy Advent. Whether my theology is correct or not.
My heart beamed Friday night as my sons welcomed the Sabbath with perfectly sung prayers.My heart broke Saturday night as my sons fought while I grilled a perfect wild-caught salmon, and I got indigestion instead of the meal I thought I deserved.
I'm reminded of the saying, "A Man's children and his garden both reflect the amount of weeding done during the growing season." And, the growing goes both ways as we fathers grow, have to grow -- into the men we want to be under our children's careful observation, into the men that they need.
We yearn to please but, most important, to pass on life's lessons.
Father's Day is full of platitudes and real feelings, of missed and appreciated opportunities. And, of how much we care by just being there. I'm reminded of GeorgeStrait's "A Father's Love", of Conway Twitty's "That's My Job", of Rascal Flatt's "My Wish."True, heartfelt, and missing the tougher choices we have to make and impose to make as sure as we can that our children grow into responsible, resilient and caring adults.
There's a wisecrack, "If God is so perfect, how do you explain us."As fathers, we're not perfect, but we try to find and know the ways to be better, and most of us find it. We continue to strive, and so may our children, with a higher hand to reach for and give us the strength to be better and have hope.
"I drink beer whenever I can get my hands on any," Merton confessed. "I love beer, and by that very fact, the world." But even in the hermitage, Merton struggled with other people's infatuation with his hermit identity.
In an age where there is much talk about "being yourself" I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else. Rather, it seems to me that when one is too intent on "being himself" he runs the risk of impersonating a shadow. . . I am accused of living in the woods like Thoreau instead of living in the desert like St. John the Baptist. All I can answer is that I am not living "like anybody." Or "unlike anybody." We all live somehow or other, and that's that. It is a compelling necessity for me to be free to embrace the necessity of my own nature.
Betrayal is a common catechism in the Church of the Self. Hymns to Me are the hosannas it hurls at an empty heaven. The politics of such a church require as First Things a rejection of all things not of, by, and for the self. A religion or a country of the people, by the people, and for the people is high on the list of things to be abhorred since it requires an allegiance that is other than to the self. The Church of the Self effectively mandates treason, and we see it now manifested daily in the bright robes of “unstiffled dissent” which shroud an increasingly vicious anti-Americanism that has its roots, not in reasoned criticism, but in unreasoned hate. We hear the hate but what we have not been allowed to see is the treason behind it.
I always have crafted my own "studies" in Judaism for the major, and some minor, Jewish holidays. This time I am so impressed with a column written by a scholar at the solid and liberal Hartman Institute in Israel, which my esteemed rabbi attends each year and which offers courses and speakers around the US at synagogues.
This column confronts the anti-Israel agenda of trying to disassociate Jews from our thousands of years of roots and attachment in favor of relative newcomers, many indeed only since Israel brought relative prosperity to the formerly barren desert. Most recently, UNESCO ignored the Jewish temples on the Mount in Jerusalem -- our holiest place-- instead just referring to the site by later Arab names.
Here's the column, well worth the read, about Jews as a people and a religion, with Passover and its narrative being highlighted for its a central portion of our daily prayers, our ethic, and our unending attachment to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount-- regardless of diaspora and persecutions.
Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a member of the Institute's iEngage Project, and a contributing editor to The New Republic. His latest book, Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation, was named the 2013 National Jewish Book Council Book of the Year. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, has just been released in paperback by HarperCollins.
Envy is diabolical. It is also human, however sinful. I am learning to identify it in myself, and then to address it when I see it. Nobody likes to identify it in themselves. My red flag is when I feel like putting other people down. Sure, other people can be jerks, idiots, mercenary, lazy, and character-flawed in a multitude of ways, but so am I. It's fair that I try to use discernment when assessing others, but that is different.
I used to deny it, or rationalize it. A bit of that came from wanting to boost myself up by mentally putting down others. That is not only sinful, but a complete and futile waste of mental energy. I recommend prayer, with humor, as an approach to malignant envy. My preaching to myself this Lenten season is to confirm that Christ is my rock, not my damn self.
To begin with a point to which many Christian thinkers would agree, the United States and other nations rooted in Judeo-Christianity have entered a time of paganization—what we might also call “re-paganization.” The gravitational pull of traditional religion seems to be diminishing, even as a-religious and anti-religious elements accumulate mass. This paganization is especially ascendant among the young, now famously more prone than any other group to checking “none of the above” when asked for their religious affiliation; according to the Pew Research Center and others, the combination of self-described atheists and self-defined “nones” is now the fastest-growing “religious” group.
Wider manifestations of this ongoing paganization have also become commonplaces: the proliferation of religious liberty court cases, legal and other attacks on Christian student groups at secular universities, demonization and caricature of religious believers, intimidation aimed at those who defend Judeo-Christian morality, and other instances of what Pope Francis himself has dubbed the “polite persecution” of believers in advanced societies...
The miracle of Chanukah, the celebration of which begins tonight, is about more than the sacred oil lasting eight days. It is about the determination of mankind to overcome despair, to rise up in our faith, to have freedom. This meditation is appropriate:
Hanukkah [Chanukah, properly, with a gutteral "ch"] begins on the 25th of Kislev. All through this period, our days grow ever shorter with light leaving our world as we move from the Jewish month of Cheshvan to Kislev. The Jewish calendar is lunar and the first of any month always coincides with the new moon, so it is easy to make certain that Hanukkah always falls at the darkest time of the year, the time when the sources of light --the moon and sun -- together cast as little light as possible. This always falls in the period from the 25th of Kislev to the beginning of the next month, Tevet. All during Hanukkah we light more and more candles, as the moon wanes and disappears and the world becomes progressively a darker place. We are rewarded on the last day when a sliver of the new moon finally appears, daylight increases, and the world outside grows progressively lighter. We can also think of this as spiritually connected with the High Holidays. Rosh Hashanah is on the 1st of Tishrei, just three months earlier, a time when we confront the darkness of our souls and the hope that we can take steps towards the light. Hanukkah demonstrates that this can take place in our physical world if we keep faith and act and persevere no matter how hopeless it all seems. The victory we will celebrate at Hanukkah is also a victory over fear and hopelessness wherever it exists –- including within ourselves.
Odetta, great folksinger and inspiration to many others ("The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta."- Bob Dylan), explains the meaning of one of her favorite songs. Listen closely. Then clap hands and sing along with her.
In her first presentation at our 2015 Eucharistic Convention Leah Libresco spoke to her subject matter "Falling in Love with Math, Morality and Mercy - My Conversion Story. It's a witness, not a sermon.
I went through a deontology phase too. She's an obsessionally morally-interested joyful and charming mathematician whose intellectual adventures lead to Christ. Cool, but I wonder what she would say about cultural transmission of moralities and values.
Weakness relates us profoundly with other people. It allows us to feel with them the human condition, the human struggle and darkness and anguish which call out for salvation. For to be a human being is to take a certain amount of suffering into life. It is hard to get at this consideration, since so much in Western civilization attempts to disguise it or affects to despise it. One of the most debilitating aspects of American society is that we do not authentically admit the cost in a struggle and almost never allow real fear to surface. Yet most of us must struggle to make a living, must wonder about our future and about our sense of personal value in a market economy, must deal with the half-articulated and half-understood problems of our children, must fear what our death will be like—what it will mean to die; we must deal with the temptation to believe that life is without meaning, that actions are inconsequential and selfish, and that other people are to be used...
The Passover Seder, in which we follow a strict order of prayers and foods, is the Jewish way of remembering from whence we came from slavery into freedom. The question has been debated among Judaism's leading scholars whether it is more important to learn the rules of Passover or the lessons of Passover. It is largely a false dichotomy. Following the Seder rules are an act of devotion and discipline to continue the memory of our roots. The memory of our roots, however, are not just about a history but a future. In every generation we are to remember and feel the experience of the Divine liberation, and that since then there have been numerous efforts to eradicate us so it is important to build solidarity and faith for survival.
The narrative is about what the past tells us for our future. The narrative is meant to be a call to discuss and think about freedom, slavery, choice, and destiny. The Exodus is a call to revolutionary hope, rather than acceding to slavery and hardship. Because of retaining the memory of the seemingly impossible liberation, as if we had ourselves experienced it, it provides the hope and belief that the days to come will not necessarily be like today, if we work and fight for a better tomorrow. That's why the Seder ends with the affirmation of next year being in Jerusalem, of the ingathering in peace, safety and justice.
The Passover Seder is a ritual meal that serves our vision of improving our lives and world.
There's a third element that is important in Judaism: enjoying ourselves so that our connectedness is emotionally felt and ongoing via teaching in an enjoyable way. With that, I give you the latest "uptown" Passover narrative:
Here's a new 2017 description of a traditional East European Passover Seder. But, Jews have been scattered all about the Earth. Here's about those delectable foods brought to the Passover table.
A reader recommended this good piece: A Job Study Guide. The author's point, in short, is that the good man Job needed to repent to connect with God. Not to repent for any things in particular, but just to fully humble himself before God.
Who the heck was Job? How did Job's story end up in the Old Testament? Was Job a Jew? There is no reason at all to think so.
I always thought the message was that God is not a tame lion, that he is power and neither a "nice guy" nor a cuddly grandpa. I mean, if "God is love" it's not of the human sort. But countless essays and books have been written about The Book of Job as if it were a riddle that man, with man's small and self-centered point of view, could solve.
Trust is faith, a scary risk, but it's ever too late to reach out for Christ's hand. Your final seconds of life are enough: Natalie Grant - Hurricane (h/t Vanderleun a couple of years ago)
It's a centuries-old complaint that Christian morality detached from its religious roots can turn into a monstrous and terrifying thing. Take utilitarianism, take angry moralizers, take witch trials, take communism, and a hundred more examples of humanist evil. 
From 