AS DIFFICULT AS it is to learn to trust a mentor, it is even more arduous to break down our self suspicion. Do we have what it takes to break free of the entanglements of the Dark Wood - to melt with feeling-intellect the icy encrustations of Hell that keep us paralyzed in our self defeating patterns? We stare eyeball to eyeball at the antagonist within, sizing up our character and our chances of restoration.
VIRTUE IS FOUND at the margins of society more often than at its centre. If this is so, Mary Shelley's Monster is a real find! Her creature is an isolate of great sensitivity, kindness, and insight. Contrary to James Whale's 1931 film of the Creature as a lumbering dolt, Mary Shelley's Monster was modeled on Rousseau's notion of humanity as the "noble savage." The nobility of the Creature is evident as he unveils his chronicle to Victor Frankenstein upon the icy crags of Mount Blanc. Meet Frankenstein's Creature
MORE THAN A fact or doctrine, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth embodies personal and historical hope. While reading a variety of viewpoints on the resurrection, I have been alternatively confused, comforted, restored and unexpectedly devastated by this theme. Internally and subjectively the resurrection is an encounter with the epicenter of meaning and significance. Without a living encounter and reliance on the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, spirituality amounts to little more than armchair speculation. This strikes at the root of my fears because my intellect hesitates to believe that a person whose bodily functions had ceased, whose tether to
THE DESERT CAN be an empty place where the lost are driven insane by inner demons, or it can be a place of refuge and real where pilgrims escape the insanity of a chaotic world. Our desert experience is determined by how we cope with being alone. Solitude can bring strange illusions and despair or it can strip us of faulty dependence, filling us with a desire for our Creator.
I DON'T THINK that it is inconsequential that my heroes are men.... It is not because women are not as passionate, creative, or in any way undeserving that they don't make my short list of heroes. Rather, it is because I share with most men an inclination toward "Prometheanism". I don't know why it is not as prevalent in most women. Perhaps it is the hard wiring of centuries of birthing and caring for life (if I am allowed that stereotypical explanation). I do not think it is because women are morally superior to men, only that
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.
Everybody loves to see justice done on somebody else. Justice has become an off-putting term for me. I associate it with political correctness and link it to individual rights. Justice seems to me merely ideological, an excuse for group or self interest. I know this attitude of mine must be prejudiced since every moral perspective, including Aristotle and the Bible, place justice close to the starting point of its ethics. It's time that I take a more objective look at the virtue starting with the reasons for my bias against it.
Like me with my young son, we are inclined to put our passions into seeing where we stand in relationship with one another. It's about comparison. We look at each other, not so much to honestly evaluate one another but to discern what degree of giftedness our brother or sister has in relation to ourselves. We look over our shoulders to see how someone else does. When we live comparatively like that, the sole purpose of life is to gauge our significance. We all have doubts about ourselves and our worth. It's natural. But the more doubt we
Stealing from the title of Dickens' book A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Watershed's story could be equally called A Tale of Two Wisdoms: God's Wisdom and Human Wisdom (1991-2015). I tell this story not in order to disparage the intellect or learning from a human point of view but rather to show how we might have used these two wisdoms incorrectly. Why and how wisdom gets expressed in our lives is what I have in mind.
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.