All The Young Gods Have Lost Their Way

Obit

2009-05-29T02:05:41Z

May 28, 1982 - Dec. 7, 2003

Nathan Delevan of Seattle died Sunday in an automobile accident. He was 21.

A celebration of life service will be held at 11 a.m. Friday, Dec. 12 at Deschutes Christian Fellowship, followed by a graveside service at Pilot Butte Cemetery.

Mr. Delevan was born May 28, 1982, in Palo Alto, Calif. He was a graduate of Bend High School and was attending the University of Puget Sound.

Mr. Delevan was a musician and worked as a recording engineer.

Autumn Funerals is in charge of arrangements.

Emerson? on travel

2009-05-07T15:10:06Z

The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.

Travelling is a fool's paradise.

Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home.

All one body

2009-04-05T15:20:40Z

Sow Flowers by Rahman Baba

Sow flowers so your surroundings become a garden
Don’t sow thorns; for they will prick your feet
If you shoot arrows at others,
Know that the same arrow will come back to hit you.
Don’t dig a well in another’s path,
In case you come to the well’s edge
You look at everyone with hungry eyes
But you will be first to become mere dirt.
Humans are all one body,
Whoever tortures another, wounds himself.

Tere Bina

2008-04-05T10:47:53Z

Railroad, family and friends
Night
Your life is about to vanish under another
You go off searching for two last minutes of freedom

I go off too, searching for my own freedom
(I can't watch this)
And get chased by dogs
And step in cow shit

Which is what this whole thing is
Shit, shit
My life already vanished
Under, inside another life, wedded and tied
And home has become those two minutes of smoke

J.

Silence is Golden. Gold is Selfish. The Selfish are Bitter. Hence, Silence is Bitter.

2007-09-09T10:57:32Z

"Some things you can feel coming. You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. When you feel that need, you have to watch your step; like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus."

-Foucault's Pendulum

Spontaneous poem about nothing.

2007-08-11T19:57:27Z

I loved a woman, once,
She was every woman who ever was
Her hair was black, her eyes brown,
Nondescript, but striking, and her face unique.

I loved a girl, once,
Cherry lips curled in domestic furlings
"I've known you too long," she said
and kissed my cheek.

I loved a lady, once,
Legs crossed in another direction, away
When she spoke, she had authority,
But her answer was still "no."

I loved you, once,
You knew I was going to say that
You always seem to know what I'm going to say
And never what I want to say.

Love hurts, right? Satisfaction is for the dead and the very young. The rest of us suffer through love and want to.

END OF RANT

shishno2 @ 2007-04-26T23:41:00

2007-04-27T06:44:31Z

"Temples and cities were also reconstructed by later Sumerians and Akkadians who never claimed to build from their dreams or their own inspiration. They always noted that their works were restorations, and when they could not finish something they left a plea for the next king to do so. They made careful records of their restoration plans, inscribed on tablets, to be found by those who would follow. In most cases, these records were buried in the foundation of the restoration or built into the wall itself, made purposely invisible. Addressed to an unknown king of the future, they would only be found if the temple or edifice had once again been destroyed. This it the profound sense of history with which Abraham was imbued: loss and restoration were its substance, built into the literal bricks of the city."

Abraham, The First Historical Biography - David Rosenberg

...could be taken personally, no?
J.

Interesting Take On Religion

2007-03-08T06:36:22Z

"You and I lead comfortable existences, full of pleasure and interest, and generally so heavily regulated that we do not face that many moral challenges. We may feel that we do not have much of a spiritual void to fill...But look at these creeps...It's not so much that they have been deprived of love, but that they have been deprived of authority of any kind...However ludicrous it may seem, religion sets boundaries; it suggests to bad and loveless people that they are loved. It provides a framework."

Some lyrics I like.

2007-02-17T09:02:01Z

One hand on this wily comet
Take a drink just to give me some weight
Some uber-man I'd make - I'm barely a vapor

They shone a chlorine light on a host of individual sins
Let's carve my aging face off
Fetch us a knife
Start with my eyes
Down so the lines form a grimacing smile

Close your eyes to corral a virtue
Is this fooling anyone else?
Never worked so long and hard to cement a failure

We can blow on our thumbs and posture
But the lonely are such delicate things
The wind from a wasp could blow them
Into the sea
With stones on their feet
Lost to the light and the loving we need

Still to come
The worst part and you know it
There is a numbness in your heart and it's growing

With burnt sage and a forest of bygones
I click my heels, get the devils in line
A list of things I could lay the blame on might give me a way out

But with each turn
It's this front and center
Like a dart stuck square in your eye
Every post you can hitch your faith on
Is a pie in the sky
Chock full of lies
A tool we devise
To make sinking stones fly

And still to come
The worst part and you know it
There is a numbness in your heart and it's growing...

The Shins, Wincing the Night Away, A Comet Appears

A quote from emusic...

2007-02-09T17:51:04Z

"Inspired by the desire to replace feelings of desperation with feelings of hope "The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place" (written over and over on the cover as if someone is trying to convince themselves...) is an empathetic companion to anyone who's felt the same."

The Little Boy Blue

2007-02-01T07:39:25Z

I dreamt about the apocalypse again... here's how it went:

I brought a new type of board game to the table, where some friends were sitting. my brother was also in the house, but in another room, as well as another friend. I opened the box and removed the very hefty manual and two sets of figurines contained by glass display cases. removing the top of the display cases revealed the plastic blue figurines: a little blue boy, standing, a blue dog that I set down by his side, a very steep blue mountain about the same height as the blue boy, atop which was a tiny house, and a square-paned window, that i set down in front of the boy. the idea of the game was to care for the boy, by singing him songs, teaching him things, etc. The manual was really more of a workbook than anything, and the game was designed for two groups of people to play together. I bent down and looked through the tiny window from behind the blue boy, to see through it from his point of view. I saw the mountains that ringed my own house in the window, dark in the night, but with a setting sun in the right side. I sat up, and then realized that the time was far too late for the sun to be going down! I looked through the tiny window again and saw the "sun" move, then expand, getting bigger... I sat up and ran to the window of my house, shouting, "Whoah, there's a huge explosion at the top of the hill!!" I stopped in front of my window and gasped... It was not just one explosion, but several explosions moving rapidly toward the house, as planes (I could hear them but not see them) dropped their mighty bombs in an approach to Los Angeles, which was past me a ways to the south. The house rocked as a bomb blasted nearby, and I shouted again, "Oh my God, get under something, brace yourselves!" I ran and braced myself in a doorway, from where I could see through the south window toward the city.

The city was engulfed in explosions, the entire city covered in bomb blast after bomb blast, the molten red heat expanding like bubbles where they grew.. and suddenly a huge wave of lava started pouring from the city and down into the valley where my house sat. I screamed and stood up as, so quickly, the lava poured around and under my home, causing it to lurch down as it was consumed. I ran toward the front door, and through it, but on the porch I was stuck, the way forward being too high, and the way backward being a torrent of molasses-like hot lava. I yelled, "God!! Save me!!" and fell backwards...
I landed on my feet on what was probably the only rock not engulfed by the molten lava and crouched, nervous that at any moment the fire would wash over me and burn me alive where I stood. I knew that eventually the lava would slow, then harden, and I could see what had become of the world... but the dismay at being stranded here, with miles and miles of hot nothingness all around me, the realization that it's all over now for me and for everyone I loved, was overwhelming...

and that feeling woke me up.

Interpret as you like.

A poem I promised to memorize

2007-01-31T05:17:41Z

Under One Small Star
~

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.
Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize for my record of minutes to those who cry from
the depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep
today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don't rush to you bearing a spoonful
of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the
same cage,
your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.
My apologies to the felled tree for the table's four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don't pay me much attention.
Dignity, please be magnanimous.
Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional
thread from your train.
Soul, don't take offense that I've only got you now and then.
My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can't be each woman and
each man.
I know I won't be justfied as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

- Wislawa Symborska

Mothers and Kids

2006-12-17T16:51:00Z

Who teaches a mother to separate the sugar cubes from the aniseed to give to her son because that's the part he likes best? These simple things contain the mysticism life exists for, somehow...

On an airplane I was thinking...

2006-12-17T16:49:46Z

Life always works out for the best? Who makes that happen? Certainly not God; his work is more subtle. We are the ones responsible for the end result, and we so often pull toward the direction which comforts and heals us. It's a style of self-preservation, only we are so unaware of our own instincts that we mistake it for divine blessing, often even to the point that we feel our original wrong act is justified and hence acceptable.

Forgiveness isn't wrapped up in the ultimate consequences of an action, but in the moment of the act itself. Kierkegaard is right; we live at all times in the eleventh hour, one stroke before midnight, and always we must repent and be forgiven, because the entire meaning of our actions is contained solely in the act itself, not beforehand or afterward.

In my mind

2006-11-18T12:02:08Z

In my mind there is a very large, dark room
and in the back, on a wall that isn't a wall,
an observer watches. The watcher, I call him.

And in this room my consciousness cavorts around
creating possibilities and chattering.

And the room's depth is another part of my mind, the space itself
some places thicker and darker than others, some places open areas with the hint of a floor,
and endless space.

These are the parts of my mind that I can see with my conscious mind
as it flirts and flickers with the darkness, forming shapes and ideas,
as it knows the watcher is observing but cannot go past it,
cannot fathom it or its purpose.

And the room is dark and wide,
endlessly open and yet guiding in ways the watcher does not.

My consciousness a river, the darkness a path,
the watcher watches. This is all in my mind.
The rest I make for myself.

Funerals

2006-10-01T02:29:15Z

I went to a funeral today... a friend's father died last week while I was in New York. I drove 85 miles to attend the funeral and try to support my friend, and when I got there I slowly but surely freaked out, until I had to leave, 3 hours later. I was terrified, shaking, and really, really sad. My grief about Nay might not be over and done with, it seems. I feel really ashamed now, because how can I be there for the people I love when I can't support them in times of great need, like this? I tried as hard as I could to be "normal", to say hi to friends that were there and to reach out and help. But I couldn't; instead, I rambled, fled, didn't know where to put myself, and eventually broke down, bawling in the car to the point that I had to stuff it or get in a wreck. And the worst part is that I don't even know precisely why I was crying. I do know that I wrote a letter to the deceased guy, who I only met a few times, put it in the card box where people were dropping memories of him, and after that I couldn't handle any more grief. There's something comforting and at the same time horribly sad about talking to the dead.

I'm sorry, D., that I couldn't be there to give you more hugs and let you cry and talk. If it were me I would've wanted me to be there to hold me and give me support - I know you need it, and you have it from all the other great friends and family there. I'm sorry that your dad's funeral turned itself on me and made me grieve all over again for Nay, and I'm sorry that I couldn't hold it together. Love you.

Role Model

2006-09-15T07:20:49Z

A role model is someone you look up to, identify with. It's someone you aspire to be like, and you emulate him because he has some quality you want for yourself. Or, alternatively, you emulate him because you're me, and VERY susceptible to emulation and identification with someone else.

I have an email somewhere... that I can't find, that I wrote to myself once, that said something like, "what if the feeling that you're just behind the current social movements, the feeling that you had that idea almost simultaneously with others, but they ended up making a movie out of it, writing a book, is really the reverse, and what's actually happening is that you're suggestive and being suggested to, right before the movie or book comes out?" Of course, I said it more succinctly at the time.

----------------------
In college I chose classes that had people in them that I liked, that I wanted to be like. I ended up with a major in History, the one that had the least required classes and the most electives. I'm not joking, that's how I chose my major.

I "broke up" with a good friend because I was tired of "orbiting him", as if he were the sun and all of us were his planets. Don't worry, we got back together.

I left a girl because she was becoming too much like me. (or was I becoming too much like her?)

I watch a television series about someone who's OCD, and I start picking up nervous ticks and feel like I want to touch every pole I pass. I watch a television series about a miserable doctor, and I start sincerely worrying if my liver is failing while simultaneously thinking that drugs are ok to take on a daily basis and I deserve to be depressed and hopeless.

My greatest stress about church lies in the fear of being misled, manipulated, that I will accept, and by accepting be led into false hope and put under the power of someone not worthy, not capable, a backbiting moron. Only because it's happened before, again and again, in the past.

I hate advertising, get angry at commercials that say "do it now", "you deserve it", "you need it". You keep telling me that, and I'll probably believe you. And then you'll steal my money, you motherfuckers.

When I read philosophy, I not only understand what they're saying, I LIVE it. I know what Kirkegaard's dread in Fear and Trembling feels like, because the book depressed me for a month in the face of my unworthiness.

Reading myths saved me from another bout of hopelessness, because they felt like home. How can a book feel like home? It can if the thought patterns it brings up are familiar and pleasant - identifiable, cause an empathetic feeling in a positive way.
-----------------------

Get what I'm saying? I'm Columbine. I'm the kid whose parents take away all his non-religious music because of how they can influence him to become a satanist. I'm the one that is only comfortable hanging around people he wants to be like, and feels that the rest are toxic. I'm Hitler's favorite. I'm a cultist without a cult. All it takes is enough exposure and getting there first, before that path shuts down in my head because of some other one.

It's an epiphany. All my life I've been looking for a role model. All my life I've been finding them, too. One after the other.

Ups and downs based on having a role model and not having one? Identifying with something positive, and then something negative?

I dunno. I'm pretty sure it's not good to be this way, though. Living in a bubble isn't feasible, and the world is full of claws and scary old guys in white vans handing out free candy.

More to come.

END OF RANT

The meaning of the title

2006-09-13T04:09:06Z

"And life unscales its rusty weathered pelt, and earth wells out in tender exhaustless strength, and the cup of a man's heart runs over with dateless expectancy, tongueless promise, indefinable desire. Something gathers in the throat, something blinds him in the eyes, and faint and valorous horns sound through the earth.

The little girls trot pigtailed primly on their dutiful way to school; but the young gods loiter: they hear the reed, the oatenstop, the running goat-hoofs in the spongy wood, here, there, everywhere: they dawdle, listen, fleetest when they wait, go vaguely on to their one fixed home, because the earth is full of ancient rumor and they cannot find the way. All of the gods have lost the way."

~Thomas Wolfe, "Look Homeward, Angel"

Apartment Life

2006-09-08T07:21:29Z

I remember this one time, a couple of years ago. A new couple, japanese, moved in a few doors down, on my floor. I would spend the nights on the balcony, listening to the lights buzz and their little newborn's screaming fits, night after night, for a while. The father would yell sometimes, the mother would cry. The kid just wouldn't stop wailing, and they were so tired. They'd come in and out of their apartment looking haggard... the woman deteriorated over time, growing dark; the man's eyes got baggy and hard. One night, the baby was screaming bloody murder, and the man was yelling, and then.... nothing. Silence. For two weeks, silence, and then they moved out. Dunno what happened to the kid; I never saw it.

Walking into my apartment building tonight after going to the car for another pack of these delicious Carlton practically-no-f'n-nicotine smokes, i stop by the little library downstairs to pick up something fictioney. And while I'm standing there looking at all of my books mingled with other people's much more boring books... sobbing. A woman crying. A man yelling. More crying.

So I picked up some book about vampires who save the dead by biting them, and went up stairs to smoke my smoke and go to bed. After writing this, of course.

END OF RANT

Something to do with speaking in tongues and Corinthians 14

2006-08-27T08:01:39Z

When I was young I used to go to church. Actually, I used to be really into church. At the beginning it was because I was afraid; church people, and my elementary school, promised me that if I became saved I would be assured in my heart that God loved me, that I would feel it. When an altar call came (church people know what this is...) I went up and got "saved". Every altar call. Again, again... because I never felt saved, the prayer would come and go and I was still the same person.

    They told me there were signs that you were saved... spiritual gifts, like speaking in tongues and prophesying, or seeing visions. When I was ten or so I was put in a room with a few other kids and told that I could leave when I 'manifested' a spiritual gift. I was one of the last to leave... nothing happened, even though I was praying, and I had to pretend to see a vision and explain it, and what it meant, before they would let me out.

    At another time, I was at a camp, and a counselor took my cabin out and we were to speak in tongues while praying, each of us. I faked it... it's easy to speak gibbrish, really.

    I gave up... when I was twelve I decided that people trying to push me over so I would be 'slain by the spirit', among other things, was pointless, and I didn't have a spiritual gift or any feeling in my heart that I was saved, so I decided that pastors were bullshitters and anyone who talked like they knew who God was didn't know any more about it than I did. I started reading the Bible. I read it a lot: I outlined books, kept pages of key verses, read the multiple accounts of the same things in the gospels... I had a revival of my churchgoing-ness in high school, but more shit, more people in charge kept contradicting me and saying things that I'd never read in the Bible, and I left again, and never went back.

    Sure, I'll go to church now and then, but it's terrifying, truly. My mouth used to get numb until I couldn't make the words when singing in church, when I'd go. I would get so stressed out trying to avoid being coerced and manipulated while the pastor spoke the sermon, cross-checking everything he said with what I'd read in the Bible to make sure he wasn't wrong, that I would be sweating with a headache by the time the sermon ended. And usually, just like after movies, people would come up to me and ask me, "what did you think?" and I'd have to come up with something to make them feel all right about inviting me in the first place.

    All this rambling to say that I haven't been a regular churchgoer in about twelve years, and I have read, and still read, a lot of the Bible, and I have a fair recollection of the sermons I've heard... but it took me about fifteen years of reading, up till tonight, to read the chapter AFTER the famous 1 Corinthians 13, the "love is..." book.

    You know... love is patient, kind, is not proud, does not boast... these three remain, faith hope love, but the greatest of these is love. Read it a thousand times, it's in weddings, it's a favorite sermon. And reading it tonight, it really is poetry. Nobody seems to get what it means, but it's beautiful. But there's a part at the end of it that made me read the next chapter... most people skim over it, in my experience, and I did too:

"8 ...But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.
9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part,
10 but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears."

The really sad/funny thing is that rather than the next chapter being all about love, or the line that goes, "when I was a child, blah blah, but when I became a man I put away childish things", or any of the other really profound parts of chapter 13, chapter 14 is all about verse 8, above. I'm not going to try to explain in any more detail why this struck me as being so important tonight, except for quoting a few verses that just redefined my entire Christian experience, and affirmed it. I can't explain it right now, it's really late and I'm tired. So I'm just going to post it, and the rambling church history that doesn't seem to relate to anything else I have up here, and let it go until I can say it again more clearly:

"13 For this reason anyone who speaks in a tongue should pray that he may interpret what he says.
14 For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful.
15 So what shall I do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will also pray with my mind; I will sing with my spirit, but I will also sing with my mind.
16 If you are praising God with your spirit, how can one who finds himself among those who do not understandsay "Amen" to your thanksgiving, since he does not know what you are saying?
17You may be giving thanks well enough, but the other man is not edified.
18 I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you.
19 But in the church I would rather speak five intelligible words to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue."

Indeed.

END OF RANT

Incoherent ramble

2006-08-26T04:25:45Z

religious zealotry doesn't solve
the fundamental problem of life
that it is unfair

it doesn't even solve minor problems
such as how to speak to strangers
or when it's okay to cry
even the simple, daily decision
of what to eat for dinner
is spiritually devoid of answers

and when judas flew to the guard
and told him he had a message for the sanhedrin
and passed along the wherabouts of the Christ
did he, while racing toward his mortal decision
consider that he had walked too much the day before
and that his legs were aching?

sometimes people do the right thing and suffer
and sometimes they do the wrong things and have pain
but by far the majority of time is spent
not even wondering if what we do is in either category

it's only when we grieve that we recognize ourselves
and understand that life isn't what we make of it
it's what we are
and what we are is usually, at best, mildly unpleasant
but we do it anyway, because we would rather be
than not be.

Smidgeon of an outline

2006-08-24T05:47:24Z

To Learn How To Live

Using 19th century ethics

as exhibited by its authors, including Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche

1) Car's running, but you're still in the garage
    "Dirt washes off"
1a) Causes:
    Fear of life - Kafka
        "K: The essence of human existence is uncertainty, the very realm in which faith must live to become meaningful"
    Don't know how to live
        Lack guidance
    Afraid of experience / of being sinful
        Afraid of what?
            Doing the wrong thing
            Making a mistake
            Pain
            Of being average, after trying
2) Basic Religious Thinking
    Argument for moral guidance
        "To exist as a human being means to exist ethically"
    Religious Principles
            'She had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards she obeyed were private ones.' (MacDonald?)
        Responsibility
        Patient Endurance
        Faithfulness
            "I am what I do"
            "D: Christian faith is something to be lived, it cannot be comprehended abstractly"
            "K: A man who merely contemplates a truth is apt to become a traitor like Judas"
            ' Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is

innefectual thereby becomes meaningless. An embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself.'
        Existentialism, Actuality
        Calmness Against Resentment
            self-judging in all things
            When anyone is disturbed or saddened under the pretext of a good and soul-profiting matter, and is angered against his neighbour, it

is evident that this is not according to God: for everything that is of God is peaceful and useful and leads a man to humility and to judging himself. (St.

Barsanuphius the Great)
    Kierkegaard's Three Stages
        Aesthetic
            Leads to despair
            Nietzsche the master
            Sartre - Nausea
            Camus - Sisyphus
        Ethical
        Religious
3) Sin
        3a1) What is sinful
            Ideas about sin
                Dostoevsky's idea
                Kierkegaard's idea
                Nietzsche's idea
            Guilt
                Dostoevsky
                Kierkegaard
                Nietzsche
        3a2) What is righteous
            Faith, its meaning
            "K:The opposite of sin is not virtue, but faith"
            The Two Commandments
3) Absolution
    Nietzsche - A life unlived
        "K: [need] an attitude that will risk an experiment in living"
    Dostevsky - Loving Action - "Zosima: You will be convinced of God's reality to the same degree that you practice Christian love"
    Kierkegaard - sin against life, despair as sin
4) The Case for Actuality
5) Suffering
6) Lukewarmness
    Indecision as sin - "K: the sin that one is writing poetry instead of living"
        "K: indifference is worse than sin in the verdict of Jesus"
    Passionate belief

shishno2 @ 2006-08-13T23:18:00

2006-08-14T06:21:35Z

This journal rambles, I know, because I throw thoughts up that relate to posts that are months old, and I rarely re-organize everything. But that's what metatags are for, no? Anyway, this one relates to the mega-essay that i'm writing in my head, of which the last 7-8 posts or so relate to:

"Christianity, Catholicism, isn't a collection of prohibitions: It's a positive option," said the Pope, lamenting that "this idea has almost completely disappeared today."

"We've heard so much about what is not allowed that now it's time to say: We have a positive idea to offer, that man and woman are made for each other," he said in response to a question on families.

Statcounter

2006-07-12T06:13:26Z

True Love

2006-07-07T04:07:34Z

I'm trying hard to learn what to do to cure my own sicknesses and to live a life of love towards others... especially these days, I'm learning a ton about just how hard this is. So I'm going to Christianity to help me answer the difficult questions I have regarding resentment when others do you wrong, to learn to love people and help them even if what they do is sinful and causes them pain. I think it's the first time in my life where I've been faced so directly with these questions, and so I'm learning all I can what to do when life gets hard in this way, and how to not only help other people but tame myself and become the person I should be, by training out the bitterness, anger, resentment, as well as the habits and compulsions inside me. It's so not easy!! Here are some snips of what I'm reading now.

So the holy fathers, by patience and love, draw the brother and do not spurn him nor show themselves unfriendly towards him, but as a mother who has an unruly son does not hate him or turn away from him but rules him with sweetness and sometimes does things to please him, so they always protect him and keep him in order and they gain a hold on him so that with time they correct the erring brother and do not allow him to harm anyone else, and in doing so they greatly advance towards the love of Christ.

What did the blessed Ammon do when those brothers, greatly disturbed, came to him and said, 'Come and see, Father. There is a young woman in brother X's cell!' [9] What tenderness he showed to the erring brother. What great love there was in that great soul. Knowing that the brother had hidden the woman in a large barrel, he went in, sat down on it, and told the others to search the whole place. And when they found nothing he said to them, 'May God forgive you!' And so dismissing them in disgrace, he called out to them that they should not readily believe anything against their neighbor.

By his consideration for his brother he not only protected him after God but corrected him when the right moment came. For when they were alone he laid on him the hand with which he had thrown the others out, and said, 'Have a care for yourself, brother'. Immediately the other's conscience pricked him and he was stricken with remorse, so swiftly did the mercy and sympathy of the old man work upon his soul. ...to put it simply, not to turn aside or run away from our own members even those of bad reputation but to do all we can to cure their disease.

In this way we ought to bear one another's burdens, to help one another and be helped by others who are stronger than ourselves, to think of everything and do everything that can help ourselves and others, for we are members one of another,' as the Apostle says. If we are one body each is a member of the other. If one member suffers, all the others suffer with it. What does our 'cenobia', our community life mean to you? Do you not reckon that we are one body, and all members of one another?