Egregious Reader

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...