IF PERFECT LOVE casts out all fear, how can fear of the Lord be the beginning of knowledge, understanding and wisdom? My experience confirms the returns of love but adamantly denies fear's benefit.
While trapped in circumstances self-constructed or brought on by misfortune, the assurance of being loved has calmed and focused my guilty, anxious mind. Love experienced as an unexpected gift has turned meaningless tragedies into moments of contemplation, gratitude and even
Today's homily is called "The Prophetic Protocol," a strange title! Protocol is about the conventions needed to get things done. It's the how-to of life, whether it relates to our personal lives, our health, finances, worship, even our computers. Protocol requires a problem, a procedure, and a fix. It's a way of getting our feet out of the fire, a proven strategy. Our way of getting things done will differ, depending on the assumptions we make about the resources we have, and how we use them.
With all our discussions about how to relate responsibly and with spiritual maturity toward society, various themes have been creeping out of my mental woodwork, converging, and making me reflect upon my feelings about society and my attitudes and behaviours toward it.
During a recent Watershed Worship and Discernment service, I confessed my Golden Calf: my creative use of language, my gift of teaching and speaking. The occasion for this confession was Tyler's comment that sometimes what we are overwhelmed by, even obsessed by creatively, can be a gift from God - an expression of our true vocation. To surrender oneself to that creativity seems not the creation of a Golden Calf but rather an enthusiastic response to the divine call. There is an important truth in Tyler's comment that our gifts are from God and that we ought to give ourselves to our vocations as an act of worship.
What does this to do with Swedish author Henning Mankell or his crime mystery Faceless Killers? This is a book response, not a parental rant against the strange world of technology. Kurt Wallander, Mankell's frumpy, grumpy Swedish crime investigator and I have something in common. We are both in danger of becoming culturally irrelevant, maybe extinct; both of us fear this looming prospect.
After the first hour of reading Chris Hedges' I Don't Believe in Atheists, my animus toward the and very popular "fundamentalist" atheists was sated. Like Chris, I have as much disdain for these pompous ignoramuses as I do for narrow religious fundamentalists. Any wrongheaded and stubborn opinion rooted in ignorance ought to repulse us.
Mary Shelley's work is symbolic. Symbols are meant to be explored with ever increasing depth rather than simply defined. What you envision as the central theme of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus will likely be governed by the interpretive lens you view the novel with rather than some unquestionable meaning revealed by the text itself. Instead of advocating any one theme, I would suggest that you explore your critical and imaginative abilities so that you can see the text in a multitude of ways. In this manner you will be attempting to see the most it can mean
Many people label Edgar Allan Poe a horror writer, plain and simple. For them, "The Pit and the Pendulum" is a tale about a victim of the Spanish Inquisition, its terror and atrocities. The readers of the 1843 edition of The Gift periodical, published in Philadelphia, were intrigued by the frightening drama and tension found in the literal telling of this tale. A more rewarding approach, one that is truer to its author's intention, is to perceive The Pit as a poem of consciousness. After pondering The Pit's meaning, I believe that the story's strength and uniqueness lies in the
Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold-Bug emphasizes the chasm between our perceptions and reality. Poe's ghoulish tone is not merely horror for the "gross out", as Stephen King calls it. The gothic elements in Poe serve the higher purpose of transforming our consciousness. One of the tell-tale signs of a Poe story is that truth is not easily accessible. When we confront reality it does not conform to our expectations. A metamorphosis, in the normal way of seeing things, takes place when we learn to question not only our general perceptions of subject but our own cherished convictions. Poe's horror supplies
We have had a variety of experiences in relationship to the Bible that colour how we have come to approach it. Some recall positive experiences of hearing a grace-filled word, others recall negative experiences of being held to account by its . Whatever our past experiences, many of us have been surprised to discover, through various authors or our own reading, that the Bible contains a depth of meaning beyond what we expected. The Word was introduced as an 'incarnate and living word', 'like Christ' in that it actually exists yet points to something transcendent. It is meant to be