At the Point of Nothingness

Is it really at the point of nothingness that all is present?  Am I really willing to find out?

Exceptions

Have you too many exceptions?  Change the rule.

Changing More Rather Than Less

When we try to make changes one at a time there is always something undone, an opportunity to focus on the incomplete aspect.  And if that effort is unsuccessful, if the change does not occur, there is a greater likelihood we will give up on that one, and on all other aspects where change is warranted.  No matter how long we have been successful, no matter how many times we have overcome this temptation, the one lapse undoes it all if there is just one change to be considered.  We are then more inclined to give up on growing in this area and in all those others we were going to get to later.

It may be better to instead undertake a lot at once.  There will then be greater opportunity to see success in life, less inclination to give up.  If on this day I am not able to successfully deal with one area, I still have others on which to focus and I can begin again with that area tomorrow, rather than let it go forever.

Humanity

People seem relieved to know we are all so much alike, that while it may be expressed in differing ways each has fears, doubt, weakness as well as virtue and strength.  We each need someone to share, a friend to confide in, a hope that if today has not gone well tomorrow may be better.  We each have an aspect of what all of us sometimes hide.  It is humanity.

The Distance of Divinity

As soon as he says Jesus is one of us, he must qualify it lest we in the sharing somehow diminish who he is as God.  So he says Jesus is human, adding he has all our traits save sin.  He died, but it was for us that he did it.  He sorrowed, but it was as an example for us and if he was angry it was a righteous indignation.  It would be OK to say Jesus is like us and to leave it at that.  To say he shares our life by his living.  There is no need to protect him from us, from the humanness of us all.  Maybe he is instead protecting us.  Maybe in the marking of distinctions he is really preventing our being lost in the distance of divinity.

Why People Chose Darkness

Jesus told Nicodemus that people had loved the darkness and hated the light, but no one loves darkness.  Darkness is more often than not a frightening place, more filled with despair than with any sort of comfort or satisfaction.  If they had not sought the light it was perhaps not shining so brightly or it had not seemed so welcoming.  Or maybe the light had been as threatening as anything else, as hard to understand.

When to Keep to a Cause

The futility of a cause is not reason enough to abandon it, especially when pursuit of it is how we are faithful to ourselves.

Questions and Answers

If you ask the question, you need not answer it as well.  It is not a dialogue if you play both parts.

Lost in the Counting

The problem with money is that it is measurable, and like anything where the more or less of it is so evident we can extend its significance beyond a reasonable point so that more equals better and having is confused with being.  If I have or lack money is not a measure of my goodness, nor is it indicative of success in anything more than acquiring and holding onto money, and if this is so in terms of me it is as true of others.  My assessment of who they are ought not get tangled in what they have, the number of their dollars.  It is hard not to count and think that in the counting we have done something important.

The Decision to Say Nothing

I don't need an answer to every question, an opinion on every topic.  I can add at least as much to some discussions by saying nothing.

Letting Go of Burdens

If I were to let everyone be who he or she is, I would not feel this burden that never was mine.

The Need to Understand

There may be more to understand, but need we understand all of it now?

Snow and Spring

Sights and smells surrendered by snow.
Roads yield where they've broken.
Cars splashing through our street.
It is not quite spring.
     (a first and last gasp of poetry, 1-27-88)

Reinterpreting Abraham and Isaac's Story

The best understanding I could wring from the story of Abraham and Isaac is to see it as an injunction against human sacrifice, a way of saying that if you understand this as God's wish you had not correctly understood.  This, of course, was not what the writer had in mind but then it was a different time, a time when God had something different to say.  Now we hopefully know there is more to parenting than an act of creating and that it would be diminishing to suggest either God or Abraham had been involved in a sacrifice destructive of their own essences.

The Great Paradox

While television feels obliged to offer spectacle, there can be only so many contests of the century and great debates.  Trying to generate that much expectation means there will be a good deal of disappointment coming to your screen.

Being Churchmen

So good at being priests they were so poor at being churchmen.

Belt-Buckling Turning Point

It is not among life's more momentous choices but sometime in your middle years you will have to decide whether to buckle your belt above or below the middle of you.  It is a decision physics forces upon us, another of the things that points out our humanity.  No need to be grateful for the instruction, but like other decisions there is not a reasonable way to pretend it need not be made.

Beware of Logic

We are so used to reason and logic we fail to recognize them as captors rather than as guides.

Letting St. Elsewhere Go

He asked was I planning to save the last episode of "St. Elsewhere."  He said he was, that he had saved the last episode of "M.A.S.H." and of "Hill Street Blues."  He wished there had been a way to save that last "Mary Tyler Moore Show," but then you can't have them all, unless you caught it as a re-run.  I wondered was this the myth of the VCR, and of other things too.  That copying or saving is the same as having.  It suggests that keeping, even of a copy, was somehow important to do.  It was like capturing time, but time is not to be captured and even to look again at those last episodes won't mean the shows are not over.

The last of anything, like any other aspect of it, is available to experience.  It can in its moment be appreciated and even applauded, but then it ends.  It cannot pretend any more newness.  If we would value it, it would be OK to do so just once, and then move on.

No, I won't be recording.  I'll watch it and I will probably miss seeing it, though I lost interest when Dr. Westphal left the show.  When it ends it will be over, as it should be.  The actors will take on other roles.  Thank them if you want for the ones they've been playing.  Know too that he never really was Dr. Westphal beyond this hour in these weeks.

Time to have them as memories, and other things too.  No need to diminish them by pretending to suspend that moment on tape.  Let it be over.  Get on with other aspects of life, and real life as well.

Alpha and Omega

The end time, the culmination, is to be the same as beginning time.  The alpha is the omega.  It is complete in the interpretation where it no longer matters that there be beginning or end.  When we say Jesus is both alpha and omega it is saying he has achieved this, or that he has become that point since it is not achieved -- not in the sense of accomplishing it by dint of one's effort.  It is the achieving of becoming, or is it instead the ceasing to become, an actualization that is a more passive than active process, a state of being content in itself.

Stuck In Facts

Here you are stuck again in your facts, unable to go beyond them, unwilling to speak a new language, one more poetic, and more imaginative.  So afraid are you of losing the ground on which you are so used to standing.  But fact is not the firm ground it seems.  It is more a swamp than it looks.  That firmness, it is grasping you.

Memorable Music

With a few exceptions it seems an era's music is more remembered than are the word of its political leaders.

The Therapist's Role

It is not my job to make you sane.  My role in this is to point out where and how I see you being crazy.

Waiting for That Rainy Day

They are content with survival and put so much away for that rainy day.  It leaves so little for living, and when that rainy day comes -- if ever it does -- they may be too arthritic to go out in it, too old to remember what was being saved or why.

Conversations Without End

Is it true that the more profound the topic, the more intense the discussion, the less interested are we in the outcome?  Are there topics that exist only to be batted about, and were we to resolve them would we miss them?  Do we need sometimes just to talk, to challenge, to debate?

Faith Is

Faith is hoping that what makes no sense can still have meaning.

Prayer Is Not For Asking

If the answer is that it will be according to his will, then why ask.  Why provide input that will not be an influence in the making of decisions.  When the need is real and the request hardly outrageous, when the asking is sincere, it is still all right that there be an answer of no.  This, however, is a response we could hope would justify itself, if it would.  But there is no justifying, no clarification.  Better perhaps that prayer be an expression of acceptance, a ceding of control and declining to wish to understand.  Better to do away with the asking if it is such an unnecessary step.

The Mark of Violence

Each time someone proposes violence as the solution to a problem he acts as though it were a brilliant new alternative rather than a worn and only destructive reply, its different or newness being only in the form of pain or destruction embodied.  It is not revelation.  Instead it is only violence, the same terrible response that marks our inadequacy or the reluctance we have to progress as a people.

Reconciliation Is Transformation

Reconciliation of opposites is not in the combining or blending of them so much as it is the transforming of them to what neither could be alone.

Proof of Healing

Jesus sent the healed leper to offer the required sacrifice.  In that way the priests would know he had been cleansed.  Too be they could not know by just looking.

People and Roles

We can think people exist only in the roles in which we know them, as though they had no being when we are not with them.  No life when not in this house, when away from this classroom, or when they leave this shop.  We may see the lesser aspect of them and think it is all there might ever be.  We may evoke only a very secondary response, a prospect that may not say too much for us, but even were they at their most vital in our company they are still not complete in this one setting.  It might be helpful to even visualize them elsewhere.  Even though that realm is not ours to share, knowing it was helps complete them in our eyes.