Tag Archives: Philosophy

The Archetype of the Shape-Changer…

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magicians_work_1479

The magician is the archetype of the shape-changer, the protean power of men to move mountains, to adjust to changed conditions, to find a way to make things work. As Sophocles noted twenty-five hundreds ago, “How numberless are the world’s wonders/And none more wonderful than man.” He who tamed the salt-churned seas, who built roads across the mountains, who wrenched from the recesses of his soul the Fifth Symphony, is the wonder-worker in nature. His shadow side, though, is control, manipulation, sleight of hand and charlatanry. He is not to be trusted. He embodies the ethical edge along which all men walk, the fine line between working wonders and treating the world as a shell game.

Under Saturn’s Shadow: The wounding and Healing of Men – James Hollis [95]

“Healing”

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D H Lawrence

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And is not because the mechanism is working
wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep
emotional self
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time.
only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long difficult repentance, realization of life’s
mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.”
– D. H. Lawrence

Give Me an N!

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You may have noticed in the last few days what appears to be an Arabic sign popping up all over the place.  I checked it out and immediately changed my profile picture on Facebook to this sign.  Why?

The sign is the letter N (nun)  in Arabic.  It is the first letter of the word Nazarene, the name by which Christians are known in the Middle East.  This letter has taken on sinister meaning as the forces of IS or ISIS mark people, property or chattel with an N meaning that the property or persons now belong to the ISIS.  Fellow Christians are given the ultimatum to convert to Islam, pay a tax or die.  Many have taken a fourth option of fleeing for their lives.  The tax of Christians and Jews by Muslims is an ancient practice from the early days of Islam.  Check it out.  I am unaware that this is the practice of modern Islamic states but it has been a  teaching of the religion.

arabic nThis reflects the problem of fundamentalism. Fundamentalists of any variety have in common a desire to regain the golden age of their faith. For Muslims it is the seventh century for many Christians 1950, but be that as it may such golden ages never existed. These fanatics (check my posting from August 9th – The True Believer) are setting out to remake the Caliphate of the Seventh Century in the Twenty-first.  Pray God they fail. It will require someone stop them as they cannot be reasoned with by honorable men. .

I have learned in my long study of Family Systems Theory that what my teacher, Rabbi Friedman, said about such is painfully true. In systems thinking all living things composed of protoplasm organize themselves in the same ways.  What is true on a cellular level is metaphor for all other levels of living things. They will behave in predictable ways.  Ed Friedman labelled them pathogens.

  • Pathogens do not self-regulate
  • Since they do not self-regulate they ooze into their neighbors space
  • Also, since they do not self-regulate themselves they never learn from their experience
  • They do not have to be hostile in order to be malignant.  Oozing into others space is sufficient.
  • Pathogens achieve their conscious or unconscious effect because those around them allow them to ooze into the others space.  Remember Munich in 1939.

It really does not matter if we are talking about cancer cells,  packs of dogs or ISIS: they all function the same.  Something will have to be done about them for the cancer they represent in the body politic.

I invite you to wear, wave or affix the Arabic Letter N to Facebook, your lapel or the bill board down the street as a mark of solidarity with our fellow Christians.  If someone reading this is not a believer please do so because the weak and innocent should not be murdered, enslaved nor raped and tortured. Call on those who have power and the responsibility for leading nations to stop these fanatics before the region is in flames not only of churches but of everything in their path. For this is a Caliphate of Evil. Muslims who do not welcome them are destroyed as well. What I say is not about the content of their belief as it is a critique of their succumbing to ideology.  Succumbing always leads to trouble (Carl Jung).

The Holy Innocents

The Holy Innocents

Please join me all of you of good will in praying for these Christians and othersr, indeed all in danger on account of their faith. I propose the collect for Holy Innocents as a place to begin.

We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of  ISIS [Bethlehem by King Herod.] Receive, we pray, into the arms of your mercy all innocent victims; and by your great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish your rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

 

God grant us and to his whole world peace and the knowledge of His love for the doing of His will. . JWS

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The True Believer

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Those with a death wish have an advantage over those who have a life.

The term “True Believer” is a common expression in American speech.  What most people do not reaize is that the turm comes from a book of that titile.  Eric Hoffer published this study of the nature of mass movements in 1951 (the year of my birth).

t b 2Given the rise of increasingly violent groups fueled by pathological ideology, Hoffer tells us that the content of the ideology is less important than the process of fanaticism.  This is a distinction that we really must learn.  It is not really about Islam, though the ideology in this case is Islamic. ISIS’s fighters, having sucumbed to ideology do not fear death. Actually dying is martyrdom for these young men.  Their opponents fight to protect their families.  Those with a death wish have an advantage over those who have a life. Thus in the short run evil has an edge.  In time, God willing, the rest of us will rise up and put an end to this most recent eruption of a chronic infection of a will to power.

Fundamentalism longs for a golden age that in fact never existed. Deep belief in fantasy promotes delusian. Delusion demands not faith, but rather a kind of “sccumbing” that produces fanatics.  I also recommend Carl Jung’s insights in the last chapter of his book,  Memories, Dreams and Reflections, where he lays out the dangers of succumbing to or being addicted to anything.

I highly recomend Eric Hoffer’s classic and  the insights of Carl Jung on fanaticsim.

Major Jason Wright

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Major Wright is defense counsel for 9/11 mastermind. He has resigned his commission rather than leave the defense team. We need more people like him in this country.

Major Wright is defense counsel for 9/11 mastermind. He has resigned his commission because he considered it unethical  to leave the defense team of a capital case even though ordered by the army.   We need more people like him in this country.

 

Studies In Classic American Literature – D H Lawrence

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[Essay on Edgar Allan Poe]

D H Lawrence

D H Lawrence

 “Love is the mysterious vital attraction which draws things together, closer, closer together.  For this reason sex is the action crisis of love. For in sex the two blood-systems, in the male and female, concentrate and come into contact, the merest film intervening. Yet if the intervening film breaks down, it is death.

So there you are. There is a limit to everything. There is a limit to love.     The central law of all organic life is that each organism is intrinsically isolate and  single in itself. The moment its isolation breaks down, and there comes an actual mixing and confusion, death sets in. This is true of every individual organism, from man to amoeba.

But the secondary law of all organic life is that each organism only lives through contact with other matter, assimilation, and contact with other life, which means assimilation of new vibrations, non-material. Each individual organism is vivified by intimate contact with fellow organism: up to a certain point.”

So man. He breathes the air into him, he swallows food and water. But more  than this.  He takes into him the life of his fellow men, with whom he comes into contact, and he gives back life to him. This contact draws nearer and nearer, as the intimacy increases. When it is a whole contact, we call it love. Men live by food, but die if they eat too much. Men live by love, but die. or cause death, if they love too much.

Sacred and Profane Love Titian (1490–1576)

Sacred and Profane Love – Titian (1490–1576)

There are two loves: sacred and profane, spiritual and sensual.

  • In sensual love, it is the two blood-systems, the man’s and woman’s, which sweep up into pure contact, and almost fuse. Almost mingle. Never quite. There is the always the finest imaginable wall between the two bloodwaves, through which pass unknown vibrations, forces, but through the blood itself must never break, or its means bleeding.
  •  In spiritual love, the contact is purely nervous. The nerves in the lovers are set vibrating in unison like two instruments. The pitch can rise higher and higher. But carry this too far, and the nerves begin to break, to bleed, as it were, and a form of death sets in.

StudiesInClassicAmericanLiteratureThe trouble about man is that he insists  on being master of his own  fate, and he insists on oneness. For instance, having discovered the ecstasy of spiritual love, he insists that he shall have this all the time, and nothing but this, for this is life. It is what he calls “heightening” life. He wants his nerves to be set vibrating in the intense and exhilarating union with the nerves of another being and by this means he acquires an ecstasy of vision, he finds himself in glowing unison with all the universe.

But as a matter of fact this glowing unison is only a temporary thing, because the first law of life is that each organism is isolate in itself, it must return to its own isolation.  Yet man has tried the glow of unison, called loved, and he likes it. It gives him  his highest gratification. He wants it. He wants it all the time. He wants and he shall have it. He doesn’t want to return to his own isolation. Or if he must, it is only as a prowling beast returns to its lair to rest and set out again.

Sacred & Profane Love - Sean Keating

Sacred & Profane Love – Sean Keating

Going Anyway!

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Adi Nes - Samuel and Saul

Adi Nes – Samuel and Saul

Many years ago now,  I mentored Education for Ministry Groups.  Much of the material was adequate but forgettable. One thing stuck. In the Old Testament we took up the stories of Samuel and Saul.  The people wanted a king and Samuel warned them not to give up the ancient ways. They persisted.   With the rise of Saul, two issues were raised which have persisted, in one form or another, throughout the Judeo-Christian story:

  1. How can the fundamental character of an original religious experience be preserved when the conditions which gave birth to that experience are significantly altered?
  2. How can any religious community develop the institutional organization it needs to preserve its identity throughout the passage of time, and still remain open to God’s direct inspiration and guidance?

I have thought about these questions as I study and consider the way forward these days. What began 500 years ago is ending. The Modern Age has joined the Victorian as ages past. We face new conditions yet again.  How many times have Christians face new conditions since that first generation after the resurrection?  In three long generations the Roman Empire moved from  persecutor to protector.  The Good News of God in Christ became the good news for revitalizing  Roman culture. Many times since this has happened. It is easy to deplore the age in which we find ourselves but that will give us no pass, no respite and not to choose is to choose.

I have no answer other than to say that God promised to lead us into all truth. That involves our attentive contemplation in the silences of our souls, I suspect.  The way forward will be revealed.  The way forward will involve narrow ways than broad and we will doubt the clarity we once thought we had. Faith is not knowing exactly where we are going but going anyway.  JWS

“It is one thin…

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“It is one thing to believe in the Incarnation as an historical event; it is another to understand, even intellectually what it means, and still another to experience the meaning in terms of everyday life and consciousness.”

Alan Watts – Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion [page 6]

RECTOR’S ADDRESS

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Christ of the Homeless - Fritz Eichenberg

Christ of the Homeless – Fritz Eichenberg

 Saint John’s Episcopal Church – Memphis, Tennessee

I want to tell you a story I heard this week.  It happened in one of the Episcopal parishes in Memphis last Sunday.  The clergy and staff were busy preparing for the service when a man came in from the cold.  A staff person saw him and introduced himself. The man’s hands were rigid, clammy cold.  He was welcomed in given coffee and a place to warm himself.

Later the Rector learned the back story.  The man had tried to get the Union Mission but they were dangerously full.  He could find no place to be so he walked through that night because to stop, rest, perchance to sleep, was deadly in 22 degree weather. By morning he had walked a long way and happened upon that parish.

catholic worker homelessEveryone gathered themselves for church and one of the clergy invited the man to church and he came, sitting near the front behind a parish family.  They invited him to communion and he went.  The service ended as Episcopal Eucharist does with the congregation dispatched to do ministry in the name of the Lord. As everyone in Church busied themselves preparing to go off to lunch as folk in Memphis have done for generations, the man from the pew in front of the guest asked if he had a coat. “No.”  He took off his own overcoat and put it on him.

And the Kingdom came near that parish that morning.  And that parish, beloved was this parish, your parish, Saint John’s.

N T Wright, Bishop of Durham (retired)

N T Wright, Bishop of Durham (retired)

I was listening to Bishop NT Wright a few days ago as I walked in my neighborhood.  He spoke directly to me about these men when he spoke of the empowering nature of the Eucharist, giving those that receive it the energy to become the occasion where Jesus’ incarnation breaks out again.”  The moment that coat left its owners back and was slipped on the man Jesus was in-fleshed again – We know what Jesus would have done if he had been there because he WAS there!

While I was in York, I heard Dr. Anthony Campolo lecture in the choir of York Minster.

Anthony Campolo

Anthony Campolo

Britain is in a national debate about these very concerns.  Dr. Campolo launched his lecture from Genesis 4: 9 Then the LORD said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?”

People rather love quoting Cain.  It distances them from any genuine connection.  Even in the Church we rather like to quote Cain, of all things?  That being as it may, the real answer Dr. Campolo announced is, “You are not your brother’s keeper.  You are your brother’s brother!”

That is my very theological point about the encounters in the film and in Saint John’s nave.  It is one thing to give, even vast sums of money, from a safe distance and from a higher position.  A story from my years in Mississippi is illustrative.  The Stew Pot was inter-faith soup kitchen in Jackson.  People from lots of religious communities had volunteers who went to serve food at the daily noon meal.  That was all well and good until a new director was appointed.  He decreed that food would no longer be served at the counter but that the volunteers would serve the homeless at their table and then when they had waited their table sit and eat with the people they served.  I don’t need to report the sad fact that when people had to come from behind the safety of the counter, serve as waiters and then break bread with the same people  …. they were never seen again.

Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi

E. Stanley Jones, a Methodist Missionary to India, was a great friend of Mahatma Gandhi.  He once asked Gandhi what Christians should do? Jones then writes the following: “The greatest living non-Christian (Gandhi) asks us not to adulterate it or tone it down, not to meet them with an emasculated gospel, but to take it in its rugged simplicity and high demand. But what are we doing? As someone has suggested, we are inoculating the world with a mild form of Christianity, so that it is now practically immune against the real thing.” (E. Stanley Jones, The Christ of the Indian Road, “The Great Hindrance.)

Which leads me to ask me and you the question: If we do not contract a lethal strain of Christianity, how can we die to self as The Holy Spirit penetrates our history and existence…

  •     How can those who do not believe contract the full influenza of grace?
  •     How can those with just enough Christianity to have an allergic reaction;
  •     How can those who contracted a comfortable Christianity, whose martyrdom is mild embarrassment;
  •     Or God forgive us, those who contacted certainty leaving them twisted and almost invincibly immune from the faith as we have   received it;
If we, you and I do not get up from breaking bread and be bread… If we have been fed and refuse to be bread, For God’s sake who will?

This city is starving to death for the very bread that only you and I can be…

That is why when I began to hear from a great distance the new life that was springing up among you as you read the scriptures, how Bible studies were organized not from the corner of Greer and Central but in offices and businesses and homes.  When I heard how new energy infused Sunday School as the daily feeding quickened the life force of faith within you, I gave thanks.

Constantine the Great

Constantine the Great

As I wandered the streets of York, knelt in Churches where human knees have bent for a 1000 years I prayed for you.  I stood near the spot that Constantine was proclaimed Emperor and went from that spot to relieve the Church from persecution and there I prayed, I asked the Almighty to give us vision for the freeing of the souls of Memphians from poverty and despair.  As I sat in the Quire of the Great Cathedral of Saint Peter, the Prince of Apostles,  who failed Jesus yet followed him anyway, and  listened to the choir chant ancient Psalms there I asked God to give us strength for the living of  these days.

Now that I am among you again, I see that the rumors of your quickening faith are not exaggerated and I give thanks.

What is the way forward?  Please join with me in praying. The renewal team continues to meet,  your staff and vestry pray and will take counsel together in the days ahead.  What I ask of you is that you consider adding the ancient practices into the living of rhythm of your days. Some physicians among us will coach us as we take up fasting.  We will offer this before Lent.  There are valid ways of anyone to fast. Resources, companions and a map will be provided anyone who will.  That is all required.  The Renewal Works process will continue as a way of life here.

Before I close, let me speak to you who signed a card in September and now find yourself wandering with the Children of Israel somewhere in the Wilderness of Numbers or Leviticus,  if you have read a sentence more scripture than you would have done otherwise that is good news.  My philosophy is that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. So take up you Bible and read.  This is not a sprint it is a long distance.  No one will be left behind. We are in this together.

To Him be glory, now and forever. Amen.