How do I not ruminate on the meaning of Easter? Raised a fundamentalist Christian, I was and am shaped by the stories of the Bible, especially those of Christ’s passion. The facts of the story are grim, and the happy ending has been added by interpretation, a after-the-fact postscript. Life is like that though. …
Good Friday, two days before Easter Sunday is the day of commemoration of Jesus’s death. There are various of interpretations of Jesus’s death by Christians. The essential idea is that Jesus was a substitute, he died as a stand-in for everyone else. The word sacrifice is typically used. The ancient religious understanding of sacrifice…
The discussion touched upon interpreting the world as absurd. Surely this cannot mean a world that is chaotic, profoundly in contradiction, schizophrenic. The world to my observation exists as a manifold of Being in flux, a perpetual dance, adjusting to cyclical seasonal increase and diminution of temperature and light. The world just is. There…
I am reading material on Existentialism, a movement that emerged in post WW II Europe. Given the intense suffering, and the brutality of Nazi occupation it seems reasonable to me that an existentialist approach to life would have been persuasive. Life stripped of anchor points for humane value, — with the vantage point of…
We are well into spring. I worked with a rake clearing up the debris fallen from the two old blue spruce trees, winters leavings. Two garbage containers were filled with twigs, and pine cones. Butter cups are on the cusp of blooming. The tulips will be close behind. I was reminded of the nature…
Another day in paradise. I say paradise ironically. We live East of Eden, outside the gates of paradise. Or to put it another way with a lyric line from Hotel California, “This could be heaven or this could be hell…” I heard about the cruise missile strike on the Syrian airbase. Shortly afterward I…
Once in a while I experience time dislocation. By that I mean a disruption in my accustomed sequence of things. Time for us is a concatenation of events, causally related, more or less–that we have adapted to. Sometimes something happens to upend those expectations. If you stop to think you can imagine events that…
This weekend I heard this tune on the radio. “Have You Seen Her” by the Chi-Lites moved me. Though I’ve not personally experienced the cause of loneliness depicted in the lyric story line, — I can relate. The point is an old one, succinctly stated by Heraclitus, “Everything changes, and nothing remains.” What time…
April 2nd, the day after my birthday. I awakened this morning thinking of my ancestors, the ones going back to the England of the first millennium. Like the common Anglo-Saxon they surely had a hoe in their hands and planted the fields at this time of year. They came to this country from somewhere…
I’m in a funk this morning. The ACA, also known as Obamacare is certain to be repealed and replaced today. The replacement will be something unaccountably cruel. The accounting will come soon enough, when the fixed sum of money allocated to the states runs out. At the same time, there is no cap on…
