Serendipity was scarce in 2023 . Prognostications for 2024 are not promising.
In 2003, a NASA Investigation Board blamed the disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia in part on PowerPoint.
Useless
Oscar Wilde:
A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse. All this is I fear very obscure. But the subject is a long one.
Sacramental Life
The sacramental life of the Church is not an aspect of the Church’s life – it is a manifestation of the whole life of the Church. It is, indeed, the very character and nature of the Church’s life. The Church does not have sacraments – the Church is a sacrament. We do not eat sacraments or just participate in the sacraments – we are sacraments. The sacraments reveal the true character of our life in Christ.
Fr Stephen Freeman
God is at work here
How many times have you thought or said this. I’ve said it too. “God must be at work here.” And what you and I are observing is something successful, something cool, something remarkable, something miraculous, something astounding. Which trains our eyes, ears, and senses to see God in the extraordinary and successful. More importantly, which trains us not to see God at work elsewhere.
What is so remarkable about Paul is that he states over and over, especially in 2 Corinthians, that he sees God most at work in his life when he is vulnerable and suffering and in pain and weak. This is the real Paul being real about the real Christian life. For him the Christian life is not about glory and success and money and prestige and honor. He does not look for the work of God in the forum of Rome or at the bema in Corinth or at the Acropolis in Athens or in well-known celebrities turning to Jesus (which is good, so too is the conversion of someone few know). He looks for the work of God in the ordinary person following the way of Jesus.
The Corinthians “Expected to see God at work in places of physical strength, material success, social achievement, human flourishing, lasting smiles and rhetorical brilliance.” But not Paul. Not the way of. Not cruciformity or Christoformitiy. In… “physical weakness, emotional brokenness and social humility” the apostle Paul “proudly witnesses to God at work in enduring and hopeful ways.
https://scotmcknight.substack.com/p/look-elsewhere
Bull-headedness
If people refuse to change, what my mother used to call “bull-headedness,” the world will only get worse. We have to learn how to dialogue, how to forgive, and how to trust, and how to give people the benefit of the doubt. In the United States, our country has become very cynical about truth and love. We hear politicians take oaths to be fair and just leaders and we all know it doesn’t mean anything. We expect everybody to be for the truth of their group and their “kingdoms.” But Jesus tells us to change our minds and accept the kingdom of God, which is what’s good for the whole.
Richard Rohr
Grief, Lament and Spiritual Bypassing
“Spiritual bypassing is a tool used to sidestep complicated emotions, psychological issues, and unfinished developmental tasks.”
“Many HCR’s (High Control Religions) instill in their followers of fear that if they grieve for too long, even after a loved one has died, their emotions will take over. Instead, HCR’s offer platitudes to get people to look on the bright side so that others around them can avoid feeling their own discomfort with grief and loss. Focus is instead placed on seeing what people can learn through the experience or what God might be teaching them. Rather than dealing with difficult emotions or painful experiences, many are taught to instead look for how God can use the situation to bring glory to his name.”
Spiritual bypassing also explains the inability, or perhaps even the unwillingness, genuinely to enter into a period of lament and sitting in it, rather than finding release points, positive possibilities, and hope. The Book of Lamentations Simply does not take us to where many in the spiritual bypassing mode want to go.
The Book of Lamentations, then, “is both survivors’ literature and survival literature.” The story we tell about the past and the story that gives meaning to the present and hope for the future. “Trauma makes one mute and numb, and recovery is not feasible without the victim finding his/her/their voice and naming his/her/their suffering.” Lament in the book of lamentations avoids mentioning God while inveighing against God. “They do not wait for Yhwh to speak; rather, they expect him to listen.”
It is a fundamental mistake then to minimize lament and grief. Healing does not occur by spinning a narrative of victory, of triumph, and of hope. Healing occurs by facing reality and in the reality learning the language of healing and hope. It is too easy to call it lament, and then abort the lament by turning to stages of progress and development.
https://www.amazon.com/When-Religion-Hurts-You-High-Control/dp/1587435888
The Roman Catholic Blessing of Same-Sex Couples
The reality is that the statement is far more limited. A few points will make this clear:
- The document clearly retains the church’s position that Christian marriage is between a man and a woman.
- Any blessing given to a same-sex couple cannot be given in a formal “liturgical” setting, which would mirror the kind of ceremony we associate with Christian marriage.
- Any blessing given to a same-sex couple is not intended to extend moral legitimacy to same-sex unions.
The blessing the document envisions is what is known as a “spontaneous” blessing. It may not be fully appreciated by many Protestants, but it is very common for Roman Catholic priests (identifiable by their clerical collar) who may be found in malls, airports, places of pilgrimage etc. to be approached by someone asking for their blessing. The document now allows priests to bless same-sex couples in these “spontaneous” non-liturgical situations.
Advent
It is a season of wonder. Wonder is an interesting thing. Scot Erickson says that wonder is “the moment when all of our narratives and stories about life disappear in the rapturous experience of actually being here.” He says that wonder is “being present with the glorious now.”
A moment of Wonder is the moment when you are speechless, overwhelmed, and caught up in a mystery. In a moment of wonder, you momentarily develop a singular focus, and everything else stops.
I want you to bring to mind the last time you experienced wonder. Don’t you long for a life of wonder and mystery and surprise and joy?
Kelly Edmiston
Taxes
The poorest quintile of Americans pays more than twice the rate of state taxes as the top 1 percent does, and about half again what the top 10 percent pays.
Single Parenting
According to the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, 60 years ago just 20 percent of children born to parents with a high-school education or less lived in a single-parent household; now that figure is nearly 70 percent. Among college-educated households, by contrast, the single-parent rate remains less than 10 percent. Since the 1970s, the divorce rate has declined significantly among college-educated couples, while it has risen dramatically among couples with only a high-school education—even as marriage itself has become less common. The rate of single parenting is in turn the single most significant predictor of social immobility across counties, according to a study led by the Stanford economist Raj Chetty.
Three in ten Americans read digital books. Whether they’re accessing online textbooks or checking out the latest bestselling e-book from the public library, the majority of these readers are subject to both the greed of Big Publishing and the priorities of Big Tech. In fact, Amazon’s Kindle held 72% of the e-reader market in 2022. And if there’s one thing we know about Big Tech companies like Amazon, their real product isn’t the book. It’s the user data.
Major publishers are giving Big Tech free rein to watch what you read and where, including books on sensitive topics, like if you check out a book on self care after an abortion. Worse, tech and publishing corporations are gobbling up data beyond your reading habits—today, there are no federal laws to stop them from surveilling people who read digital books across the entire internet.
Reader surveillance is a deeply intersectional threat, according to a congressional letter issued last week from a coalition of groups whose interests span civil rights, anti-surveillance, anti-book ban, racial justice, reproductive justice, LGBTQ+, immigrant, and antimonopoly. Our letter calls on federal lawmakers to investigate the harms of tech and publishing corporations’ powerful hold over digital book access.
This investigation is an essential first step to revive the right to read without fear of having your interests used against you. Because unfortunately, that right is on life support when it comes to digital books.
Ironically, I keep hoping someone will read what I am reading.
View from the Lanai
Our stay in Florida has been very good. The weather has been unusual but I’m confident no one wants to hear complaints.
A special part of our experience is the community, neighbors and friends we’ve grown to know and love. Even the anonymous person who left a Christmas treat on our door.