Life has changed
Life has changed for good – I know, the phrase is uncomfortably ambiguous. But for those of us later in life it’s hard to see how we will ever get back to life as we have known it for so long. And yet. Hopefulness grows out of looking for goodness, beauty, and truth in a God-made and God-loved world. If life has changed for good, perhaps it is our calling now to realise good out of the way life has changed.
Jim Gordon
Life Viewed through a Microscope
The up-close detail and what is immediately at hand, when isolated from its place within Providence as a whole, can appear to be something that it is not. Such a false focus can be one of many formulas for an anxious existence. The “truth” of our existence is only revealed in the fullness of the truth which is made known to us in Christ’s Pascha.
Fr Stephen Freeman
Broken spirituality
…we feel the spiritual yearning burning in our hearts and souls, but we struggle to keep this quest from devolving into superficiality and triviality. We long for spiritual depth, but fear our “spiritual but not religious” approach to faith is just some mystical tinsel we’d sprinkled over our consumerism and self-absorption.
Richard Beck
Really Jesus
“Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.””?
Slowing Down
This quarantine has done one thing in particular to every one of us: it has slowed us down. It’s making us dig for life’s meaning, scoffing at our ideas of productivity, and more often than not our days end with us having made very little progress towards anything of value. It’s implanting a book-pace into our media-paced lives, and forcing us to face the characters and settings with which we find ourselves before we get anything in return.
I don’t think it’s an accident that our daily rhythms have been disrupted; I think we’re being shown just what it means to let slowness be a good thing. In Living Prayer, Benson writes, “in the society in which we live, the primary rule of work seems to be to cram as much into the hours of the day as you can. If you ask people how they are doing, they will say good or bad depending on how their work is going, regardless of whether or not their marriage is failing or their kids are in trouble or their house is on fire. We rush through the present toward some future that is supposed to be better but generally turns out only to be busier. ‘Be careful what you treasure,’ I read somewhere once…”
Thomas Anderson
Expertise
To reject the notion of expertise, and to replace it with a sanctimonious insistence that every person has a right to his or her own opinion, is silly… Worse, it’s dangerous. The death of expertise is a rejection not only of knowledge, but of the ways in which we gain knowledge and learn about things. Fundamentally, it’s a rejection of science and rationality…
Now, anyone can bum rush the comments section of any major publication. Sometimes, that results in a free-for-all that spurs better thinking. Most of the time, however, it means that anyone can post anything they want, under any anonymous cover, and never have to defend their views or get called out for being wrong.
In any discussion, you have a positive obligation to learn at least enough to make the conversation possible. The University of Google doesn’t count. Remember: having a strong opinion about something isn’t the same as knowing something.
Tom Nichols
“The University of Google, is where I got my degree from.”
Disturbance
Dorotheus of Gaza, “The root of all disturbance, if one will go to its source, is that no one will blame himself.”
Let the Dance Begin . . .
Soon We now miss out on so much
the graduation of a granddaughter,
the wedding of a niece,
the Final Four,
the beginning of Baseball,
the great Easter liturgy,
the day by day interaction on the street.
The virus has imposed a huge silence among us.
It is a silence that evokes loneliness,
and domestic violence,
and job loss,
and the end of life in the bars,
and on the beach,
and in the street.
We wait; we may wait in despair,
or at least in deep disappointment.
But we may also wait differently:
we wait in confident faith;
we wait in eager longing.
we wait on the Lord.
We wait for the future and against despair,
because we know that you,
the God of life, will defeat the force of death.
We know that the Friday execution
could not defeat the life lived by Jesus
nor the life lived by his faithful people.
As we wait, we practice our next moves
for the coming dance; it is only a little while . . .
“yet a little while”; we will walk the long march of obedience;
we will run the race of discipleship;
we will soar like eagles into God’s good future of neighborliness.
We know that you will overcome the silence because the silence
. . . no more than the darkness
. . . can overcome the Lord of Life.
Amen.
Walter Brueggmann “Virus as a Summons to Faith”