Egregious Reader

You might be getting old if you get pissed when a "cool" new band doesn't meet your high standards within the first two songs. I just had that experience. Granted, today I feel a general frustration with life ... perhaps another sign of getting old. I just listened to the first song and 30 seconds of the second one from a band called Beach Slang . I turned it off after mumbling to my computer how bad this crappy music is. I am afraid for my condition ... there is no hope ... I will cross 40 in nine months.

"the political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of that nation. We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know, and the American dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels. Privately, we cannot stand our lives and dare not examine them; domestically, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country; and, internationally, for many millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster." "I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now--in order to support the moral contridictions and the spiritual aridity of my life--expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist ... White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will r...

Turns out there is some good poetry about octopi. I recently found a little poem I wrote about them after visiting the Chattanooga Aquarium with my son a few years ago. It is posted here, but if you like the idea of Octopi poems then check out Prairie Octopus, Awake  . Brick red, wrinkled skin    a million tiny cups. Plastic jars in the pebbles    at the bottom of the tank. "She likes to play with them,"    the guide tells us. She really looks beautiful,    in the strange world of water. I can see a fire in those cow eyes,    the midnight black alight. But then I see another one at the top,    this one almost pink. The red is pale and the skin seems    to hang, almost drip. "It's sad," says our guide.    She has laid her eggs and won't eat. This is their life cycle,    she's starving to death."

I feel like pus swimming just under the thin membrane at the top of a boil hoping the malicious excitement of my fellow infections will create the right pressure for rupture.

So I really enjoyed the On Being this week which interviewed a composer named Mohammed Fairouz and his newest album is called Follow, Poet which is a line from an Auden poem, but the whole thing begins with Kennedy speaking to a college a year or so before his death saying:  When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. In that characteristic Kennedy voice that is so recognizable even though I have never heard the speech before. In the interview they are discussing how Kennedy and Anwar Sadat are heros and guiding lights for Mohammed and he makes this point: These figures, who appear to the people of their generation as tragic figures, become guiding lights to the people of the next generations and the generations to come. And you know, Krista, it absolutely proves the violence that some peo...

The latest This American Life is called Three Miles and covers the class divide through two high schools in the Bronx. One is a poor public school and the other is $43k per year. It was really well done, Chana Joffe-Walt does a great job and I am glad she took up this story and worked so hard on it (tracking down Melanie). http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/550/three-miles The other thing that I am really enjoying is the first listen preview to an artist totally new to me: Laura Marling: http://www.npr.org/2015/03/15/391924095/first-listen-laura-marling-short-movie

Last part! I didn’t think my meditations on evil would be complete without some discussion of death. To do this I re-read a very short meditation by Nicholas Wolterstorff called  Lament For A Son . His son, Eric, died in a climbing accident at 25 and these were his meditations and reflections during that time which 10 years later he decided to publish in hopes of helping others to share their feelings in times of loss and lament.  I couldn't help thinking of others I have known who have lost like this. My friend Brit drowned in the red sea while free diving. He was the oldest of five.  ​Silence. 'Was there a letter from Eric today?" "When did Eric say he would call?" Now only silence. Absence and silence. When we gather now there's always someone missing, his absence as present as our presence, his silence as loud as our speech. Still five children, but one always gone. (14) ​​I also think of a two different parents I have known who had to b...

I have been working on this for a few days and know it is really long! This was my attempt to approach the evil inside us and continue on with that idea from Wright (and Solzhenitsyn) that the dividing line between good and evil runs through each of our hearts. Or the Arcade Fire song that says: "Now the preachers they talk, up on the satellite; If your looking for hell, just try looking inside." ​ 1 - Two Understandings of the Cross In a book of sermons by Reinhold Niebuhr I read the sermon The Son of Man Must Suffer . This is what I spoke on Monday in our discussion when I said that when we equate Christianity with certain knowledge we no longer need Jesus. He says there are two major ways Christians have looked to the cross for meaning: On the one hand, the death on the cross means an heroic effort of self-regarding men, whose inveterate self-love is the root of all historical evil, to transmute self-regard into self-forgetfulness, into “sacrificial love” or...

1 The world inside 2 Pennies for a beggar, Pennies sir, ma’m, Pennies for a lost soul, It doesn’t matter if they’re shiny. Stop with your polish and give me one STOP! 3 Run, run my friend down the hole, That is the place to get lost, That is the last rabbit hole on this whole planet, Run and don’t look back. 4 Look out! look out! My friend! Did you see what was going on out there? I just opened the window and there were flowers in the sky Or the clouds had formed in iris purple and the birds were all holding white in their teeth. It all meant one thing, can only mean one thing, Someday it will be alright. It all meant that someday we will find out that its alright. My God, He is some boy, a beautiful boy.   

So below is a quote from one of my favorite authors (an Orthodox Priest and scholar) Alexander Schmemann from his book on Baptism: ​"the Church has never formulated it [teaching concerning the Devil] systematically, in the form of clear and concise 'doctrine.' What is of paramount importance for us, however, is that the Church has always had the experience of the demonic, has always, in plain words, known the Devil. If this direct knowledge has not resulted in a neat and orderly doctrine, it is because of the difficulty, if not impossibility, rationally to define the irrational. And the demonic and, more generally, evil are precisely the reality of the irrational. Some theologians and philosophers, in an attempt to explain and thus to 'rationalize' the experience and the existence of evil, explained it as an absence : the absence of good. They compared it, for example, to darkness, which is nothing but the absence of light and which is dispelled when light a...

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

This is really an exploration of an essay by  Ellenore Stump and this entire four part post is from emails I was sending to fellow  book club on this topic prompted by something we read in the book. (Of course, I don't think its normal to write four part emails to fellow book club participants ... Sometimes I can't help myself and I wanted to revisit all these writings anyway). Stump begins with a question. "If the is an omnipresent, omniscient, perfectly good God, how can it be that the world is full of evil? This response to evil is normal and healthy." But instead of trying to philosophize about this: the problem of evil; she describes evil, the evil we see in the newspapers and around us as a mirror, reflecting back to us our world and ourselves. "We ourselves--you and I, that is--are members of the species that does such things." She quotes Ecclesiastes: ​I observed all the oppression that goes on under the sun: the tears of the oppressed with none...

Lambs racing in desperation running and running in a stampede induced coma A flock of birds evacuates at gunshot Ants erupt and swarm as tunnels collapse pronghorn scattering as the lion pounces Sometimes "my best, just ain't good enough."