Icicle prisms
Sparrow’s trill, a winter dirge
Light, the rainbow-bridge
#TheBookofSparrows
#Poetry
#Haiku
#Senryu
#Tanka
#Haibun
Collected Writing in History; Philosophy, Theology, Poetry, Politics with Commentary, in Prose and Verse
Icicle prisms
Sparrow’s trill, a winter dirge
Light, the rainbow-bridge
#TheBookofSparrows
#Poetry
#Haiku
#Senryu
#Tanka
#Haibun
The prophet promised help, a song of hope floating in the morning light
love
for the dandelion
Lilies
blooming in the broken asphalt, begging to be considered
broken
birds, with wings made of wishes
Saint
Stephen by a chest full of arrows, got pinioned to a tree
while
a thousand sparrows gathered in his branches
Garden
ponds and baths gone dry, water stolen by the sun
cats
cry at empty basins, biting at their fleas
Forgive
them…the hungry and the homeless, living through the heat and cold
the
lean dogs wandering the city
blessed are the meek
Presidents are human beings.
They
have all been men (so far), flawed men; everyone who has ever held the office
has been flawed. Some have had heroic attributes, but all of them have had
craven moments.
There
have only been forty-six them, and we have just lived through the chaotic and
criminal presidency of the 45th, ending with his second impeachment
after a failed and hapless insurrection that he waged in a desperate and feeble
bid to retain power, or simply to assuage his mad vanity…
Today
the occupant of the oval office is a long serving government official, former Senator
and former Vice President, the oldest man ever elected to the office, Joseph R.
Biden, and it seems like he wants to do some good for the people of this
country, which would be nice for a change since the government is meant to be
there to work for us…all of us.
We
are in the middle of a global pandemic, a catastrophe that we have been struggling
through for over a year; nearly half a million Americans have died from it, in
large part do to the rank incompetence of the 45th President.
There
is a lot of work ahead of us, and I do not know if we are up to it, but at
least we have a President who understands that it is his task to hold us all-together
while we try to get the work done.
We
have a President who seems interested in doing more than simply manage the
moment in front of us; his team, which includes the first woman to hold the
office of Vice President, his team is looking past the pandemic, they are
looking forward to the job of rebuilding our country, of redefining the
American experience, of making the American Dream a reality that includes
everyone, lifts the spirits of everyone, distributes what is just and good to
everyone, cares for everyone, and leaves no-one behind.
We
can do this; we can do it if we have the political will to push our elected
representatives to do the right thing.
I
for one am grateful that we have a new President, a hopeful President, but our
problems go well beyond the ability of one man to fix, just as they go well
beyond the scope of one man’s depravity.
Keep
hope alive!
I was fifteen years old the first time I read Dune. I had been an avid since I was eight years old when I began reading novels in the third grade, and I read the books that inspired me over and over again.
I
read all kinds of things, but at the age of fifteen I read mostly fiction, and that
age when I first read Dune in 1984, I found it to be somewhat dense and
challenging.
I
had taken that first copy from the carousel of the library at the alternative
high-school I was attending, and which I dropped out of a few month later. I
read that copy, perhaps not as carefully as I should, but as carefully as I
could, and I went to see the motion picture when it came out in 1985.
Needless
to say, I found David Lynch’s adaptation to be one of the worst movies ever
made, and with that Dune passed from
my thoughts for a time.
However,
in the summer of 1988 I was visiting a friend in Montana, and I picked up a
copy of Dune from the bookstore in
Bigfork. I needed something to read on the bus ride home to Minneapolis.
Four
years had passed since my first go at it, and my window on the world had opened
wide enough for me to be able to engage the book in a completely different way.
I was hooked. I was nineteen years old.
Dune
changed my life.
Since
then I have read Dune and all six books in the original Dune series, eight times over, as well
as everything else Frank Herbert wrote.
He
was a giant.
I
have given away dozens of copies of Dune throughout my life, and recommended it
to more people than I can count, always with the words this book will change your life.
Many
of them came back to me to tell me that it did.
Frank
Herbert wrote science fiction, but the science he wrote into his fiction had
less to do with spaceships and laser beams (though it had those things), and
more to do with the science of politics, religion, ecology and psychology, with
the human person at the center of his imagination.
Through
his insight Herbert challenges the reader to explore what it means to be human,
and he asks open-ended questions about the range of human potential in a way
that allows the reader to believe in those possibilities for themselves, and
his own view of the range of human potential is inspiring. He believe that we
can do more, be more, see more of the world than our senses allow…if we are
disciplined he believes we can do it; if we are attentive to the world around
us, and if we cultivate within ourselves the desire to live a life without fear
we will secure a future for humanity beyond our solar system and spread through
the galaxy.
He
died thirty-nine years ago today, and when he passed a heroic light left the world.
When I was still a teenager, when I was beginning to move away from the various worlds of science fiction and fantasy that occupied my imagination, when I began to leave the acid washed pages of my comic books behind, as I was moving past the authors I had been introduced to in school, the so-called American novelists, such as Lewis, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, it was then that I discovered Dostoyevsky, and a whole new dimension of literature became open to me.
This
was the crossroads where literature became philosophy, and the human condition
was laid bare.
Through
the great Russian novelist I came to understand the power of narrative, its
effectiveness at conveying certain truths that no human being can escape the
grip of, and for whatever reason there are no authors more adept at this
function than the Russian’s, with Fyodor Dostoyevsky being the foremost practitioner
of this craft.
His
influence on me was profound.
From
Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground, to The Idiot and the Brothers Karamozov, which are perhaps his most famous works in
English, I spent years reading his corpus, all the way through my twenties and
into my thirties I tracked down his cannon, until I was left with translations
of his notebooks to read…which I did.
I
purchased the notebook for A Raw Youth at
a used bookstore in Minneapolis (Majors and Quinn), one summer when I was on
leave from the Navy. It was the first of these that I discovered; in those
pages I could see the way Dostoyevsky constructed the arc of his stories, how
he developed his characters from ego to id, from false-self to true-self, from,
privilege to despair.
I
also found an Imperial Ruble, tucked into its pages, a bookmark left behind by
whoever was last to read to it.
The
note was wrinkled and faded but still a treasure to me.
When
I discovered Dostoyevsky I came to consider him as the father of
existentialism, and through him I learned to love Dickens, who Dostoyevsky
considered to be the greatest author of all time.
It
has been one hundred and forty years since Dostoyevsky went down into the dirt,
his influence has not waned, and we have not changed, his insight into the dilemma
of human existence remains, I think it is even more pertinent in this—the digital
age.
A powder-blue parallelogram, like an unplanted—field, broken
Blue-black
ink flows from the pen
A
string of sapphires, dawn’s bejeweled horizon, smoke curls off the tongue
The
trumpet wails in mourning
The
azure summer, naked in the cloudless sky, a flight of sparrows composing
The
poetry of shadows
#Poetry
#Haiku
#Senryu
#Tanka
#Haibun
#TheBookofSparrows
It is cold outside, but the sun is shining
The sky is striped, blue and white
I can feel the cold coming, seeping through the windows
The sun’s light through wavey glass
Snow clings to the limbs of my tree
Each flake a tiny prism from which the sun light leaps
And there is hope, today in America…there is hope
First Reading – Deuteronomy 18:15-20 ©
Responsorial Psalm – Psalm
94(95):1-2, 6-9 ©
Second Reading - 1 Corinthians
7:32-35 ©
Gospel Acclamation – Matthew 11:25
Alternative
Acclamation – Matthew 4:16
The Gospel According to Mark 1:21 – 28
©
(NJB)
There are
no prophets, there is no prophecy, there are only human beings. Human beings
have the innate ability to perceive and recognize what is true. But we are all,
each of us compromised; every expression of the truth coming from a human being
is conditioned by that compromise, and therefore it is necessarily flawed, and yet
despite these flaws we sometimes do good work, but because of these flaws all
human works are suspect.
Listen to
the psalmist!
It is God
who makes us well, who creates in us the possibility of wellbeing. God is our
wellbeing, but God is not a king, and there are no other gods.
All of
creation belongs to God, all that is good and all that frightens us; everything,
no matter how distressing or troubling, everything comes from God and will
redound to the good.
It is good
to show our respect for the creator and to sing songs in praise of God,
remember! Always remember that God is our loving parent, and has prepared each
of us for the divine blessing.
Be mindful!
Even the
apostle is liable to asserting his personal beliefs and foibles into the
rubrics of the Church. Not everything he says should be accepted on its face as
wise and good.
Paul
believed that people should withdraw from public life, stop procreation and
wait on God to deliver humanity from the miseries of the world. If he could
have, he would have had all of us living chaste and celibate lives behind the
walls of the cloister, men living with men and women living with women.
The apostle
errs, but the church is not obligated to follow him in this error, the more humble
thing would be to acknowledge the truth and move on.
This is the
truth:
It is the
desire of God, the creator of the universe, it is the desire of God that we
follow the way that Jesus taught, to be merciful, love justice and walk humbly
all the days of our life, to prosper and multiply.
Know this!
The
teachings of Jesus cannot be treated like a shell game, though they are, and
have been since the beginning, as Matthew’s illustrates.
The way of
Jesus is not a long con, it is not a bait and switch, it is a simple teaching
that cannot be controlled or owned by any one group of people.
God, the
creator of the universe, God has hidden nothing from us. The truth is in the
open for anyone to see. The wise and the powerful, the learned and the clever,
the weak and the meek, everyone has access to the same truth, to the knowledge
of God, of justice, of hope and love.
Who are the
wise and powerful, who are the learned and the clever, who are the faithful and
childlike? In every generation, you will see a new group labeling the elder
group as out of touch, blind, privileged, in the dark, corrupt. It is an
endless cycle, and the truth remains the same; love justice, be merciful, do
good, serve God through the loving service you provide to one another: your
family, your friend, your neighbor, the stranger, even your enemy.
Just
because a person may be wise and powerful, learned and clever, or a child of
the Church, does not mean they recognize the truth when they see it, or act
upon it when they do.
It is not
your station in society, it is not how other people regard you, it is not the
titles you have earned or the ways that you have been marginalized that give us
the tell on how you will fulfill the calling to follow Jesus. What matters is
what is in your heart and your willingness to trust in the content of your
hope.
When you
speak from the scriptures be careful.
When you observe the authors attempting to fit their
narrative of the life of Jesus into a picture that makes it look as if he is
fulfilling a prediction about the future, be wary; this is always a falsehood.
Even if a prediction had been made, and even if
Jesus did the thing that was predicted, it is a false narrative to suggest that
Jesus’ actions were in fulfillment of prophecy.
Prophets only speak of the future for two reasons;
to engender hope and to warn of danger.
The words of a prophet are always addressed to the
people in their own time, in their own place. Prophecy is never meant to guide
the lives of future generations, except in the cases when the prophet is addressing
an issue of universal truth, such as the nature of justice, which is itself
unchanging.
Know this!
The Gospel writers were propagandists; they
fabricated many of the details of Jesus’ life. They fabricated those details to
suit their narrative about who Jesus was, why he was necessary, and what his
life and death meant for the early church.
In this narrative the Gospel writers place Jesus
directly in the tradition of John the Baptist, with the words “Repent, for the
Kingdom of God is at hand.”
This is a continuation of that narrative, meant to
harness the energy of John’s movement, after his arrest and murder.
Consider the Gospel for today, it
is packed with nuance.
Begin
by unpacking:
This
is the first record of Jesus in his ministry as a public teacher.
He
is still in Palestine but he has travelled to the northern shore of the Sea of
Galilee. He is beyond the borders of Judea, half-way between Jerusalem and
Damascus.
He
gives his teaching in a synagogue, indicating his status as a Rabbi. The
synagogues belong to the diaspora, Jewish communities outside of the Holy Land.
Synagogues are the seat of the Pharisaic sect of Judaism, and Rabbis are
teachers in that movement. Pharisees are a distinct group of teachers; they promulgate
the law. They are different from the Scribes, and the priests of the temple. All
of these distinctions are communicated in the opening paragraph:
Jesus
the Pharisee, Jesus the Rabbi is teaching with authority, unlike the Scribes in
Jerusalem.
One
man calls him out. Not because he is possessed by demons, but because he afraid
of what Jesus’ teaching represents.
He
asks a good question, “What do you have to do with us?” This indicates that
Jesus is an outsider.
He
asks, “Are you here to destroy us?” This indicates that he perceives Jesus’
teaching to be a threat to the established order, and therefore quite possibly
to his entire community.
He
addresses the claim that Jesus’ followers are promoting, that he is the “Holy
One of God.” He asserts this in an unfriendly manner, quite possibly as a
charge against Jesus: a charge of hubris at the least, though it is potentially
a charge of blasphemy.
By
raising this charge he intends to undermine Jesus’ authority in the synagogue. Jesus
commands the man to silence, and Jesus prevails. This scene is depicted
dramatically in the gospel, as if Jesus were commanding an unclean spirit to
come out of the man, a spirit of disobedience and falsehood. It is presented as
Jesus casting out a demon or demons, and healing a man who was possessed. Though
it should be presented as Jesus commanding his authority to convert a dissident
into a believer.
The
narrative does not depict a supernatural challenge to Jesus’ authority, but an
ordinary challenge from a member of the community. It was not easy for Jesus to
convince the man, it was a convulsive struggle, but Jesus prevailed; he
prevailed because the community had been ready to receive Jesus’ teaching at
the outset, and his victory in the disputation with the man who argued with him,
how he managed the situation as a healer bolstered his authority all the more.
Be like Jesus in
your ministry, be a healer; it is the best way to serve the interests of the
divine.
First Reading – Deuteronomy 18:15-20 ©
I Will
Raise Up a Prophet and Put My Words into His Mouth
Moses said to the
people: ‘The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like myself, from
among yourselves, from your own brothers; to him you must listen. This is what
you yourselves asked of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the Assembly.
“Do not let me hear again” you said “the voice of the Lord my God, nor look any
longer on this great fire, or I shall die”; and the Lord said to me, “All they
have spoken is well said. I will raise up a prophet like yourself for them from
their own brothers; I will put my words into his mouth and he shall tell them
all I command him. The man who does not listen to my words that he speaks in my
name, shall be held answerable to me for it. But the prophet who presumes to
say in my name a thing I have not commanded him to say, or who speaks in the
name of other gods, that prophet shall die.”’
Responsorial Psalm – Psalm 94(95):1-2, 6-9 ©
O that today you
would listen to his voice! ‘Harden not your hearts.’
Come, ring out our
joy to the Lord;
hail the rock who saves us.
Let us come before
him, giving thanks,
with songs let us hail the Lord.
O that today you would
listen to his voice! ‘Harden not your hearts.’
Come in; let us bow
and bend low;
let us kneel before the God who made us:
for he is our God
and we
the people who belong to his pasture,
the flock that is led by his hand.
O that today you
would listen to his voice! ‘Harden not your hearts.’
O that today you
would listen to his voice!
‘Harden not your hearts as at Meribah,
as on that day at Massah in the desert
when your fathers
put me to the test;
when they tried me, though they saw my work.’
O that today you
would listen to his voice! ‘Harden not your hearts.’
Second
Reading - 1 Corinthians 7:32-35 ©
Give Your
Undivided Attention to the Lord
I would like to see
you free from all worry. An unmarried man can devote himself to the Lord’s
affairs, all he need worry about is pleasing the Lord; but a married man has to
bother about the world’s affairs and devote himself to pleasing his wife: he is
torn two ways. In the same way an unmarried woman, like a young girl, can
devote herself to the Lord’s affairs; all she need worry about is being holy in
body and spirit. The married woman, on the other hand, has to worry about the
world’s affairs and devote herself to pleasing her husband. I say this only to
help you, not to put a halter round your necks, but simply to make sure that
everything is as it should be, and that you give your undivided attention to
the Lord.
Gospel
Acclamation – Matthew 11:25
Alleluia, alleluia!
Blessed are you,
Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for revealing the mysteries of the kingdom to
mere children.
Alleluia!
Alternative
Acclamation – Matthew 4:16
Alleluia, alleluia!
The people that
lived in darkness has seen a great light; on those who dwell in the land and
shadow of death a light has dawned.
Alleluia!
The Gospel According to Mark 1:21 – 28 ©
Unlike
the Scribes, He Taught Them with Authority
Jesus
and his disciples went as far as Capernaum, and as soon as the sabbath came he
went to the synagogue and began to teach. And his teaching made a deep
impression on them because, unlike the scribes, he taught them with authority.
In
their synagogue just then there was a man possessed by an unclean spirit and it
shouted, ‘What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy
us? I know who you are: the Holy One of God.’ But Jesus said sharply, ‘Be
quiet! Come out of him!’ And the unclean spirit threw the man into convulsions
and with a loud cry went out of him. The people were so astonished that they
started asking each other what it all meant. ‘Here is a teaching that is new’
they said ‘and with authority behind it: he gives orders even to unclean
spirits and they obey him.’ And his reputation rapidly spread everywhere,
through all the surrounding Galilean countryside.
The Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time
(Year B)
When I finally made it to the university, I went to a school named for this man, The University of Saint Thomas, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, named for Saint Thomas Aquinas; I studied philosophy there, as well as theology and the classics.
It was a grand place, it felt like a university, with its tall stately
buildings made from massive blacks of light tan stone, Minnesota sandstone
quarried from the river bluffs nearby. The moment I passed through the arches
into the quad I felt like I had arrived.
My time at this school was reasonably well spent. Saint Thomas prepared
me for advanced studies elsewhere, and I continued my theological work, though
not as exhaustively as our Patron Saint, his Summa Theologica remains a unique achievement in the history of
Western thought, more important for the mode of thinking he transmitted his
ideas in than for the conclusions that he made.
Saint Thomas bridged the gap between the ancient philosophers: Socrates,
Plato, Aristotle et al, and the proto-renaissance period of Western
Europe, re-discovering the use of intellectual tools like such as formal logic
and discursive reasoning, and re-employing them in a way that allowed Europeans
to leave the Dark Ages, clearing the way for the Renaissance, the Enlightenment
and the Age of Reason that followed.
Saint Thomas died on March 7th, 1274. In 1969 the Church moved
the day we celebrate his feast to January 28th, we celebrate his
sainthood today.
Saint Thomas was Italian by birth and a member of the Dominican order, a
scholastic, and he was famous in his day. He died while making a pilgrimage on
the Appian Way, death took him at the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova, and the
monks there, fully cognizant of his fame, knowing that he would become a saint
of great renown, they coveted the relics of his body.
They boiled his carcass down and polished his bones, preserving all of the
water for distribution in the relic-trade, they refused for years to turn his
body over to his Dominican brothers, parceling out his bones and the water bit
by bit over time, keeping his skull until the very end.
The University of Saint Thomas has a vial of that water in its collection
of sacred artifacts, a silly business, really, and beneath the dignity of the
intellectual giant that Aquinas was known to be.
On his death bed it is reported that he gave an estimation of the value
of his own contribution to the doctrine and dogma of the church, of which he
said: everything is just straw.
There is a prayer that Thomas wrote carved into a column of the main
entrance to the school grounds, the same arches that I first walked through my
first day on campus, two stories below the offices of the Philosophy
Department. I recited it aloud every day that I attended classes on the campus
in Saint Paul.
It is a prayer that I carry with me still, as if it were written in my
heart:
Grant, O Merciful God
That I may ardently desire,
Prudently examine,
Truthfully acknowledge,
And perfectly accomplish
What is pleasing to thee
For the praise and glory
Of thy name
In the year 2021 CE,
seven hundred and forty-seven after the death of Saint Thomas, the world has
become enmired in another kind of dark ages, which is odd and sadly ironic
because the current tide of anti-rational, anti-intellectual sentiment that has
griped the world has been seeded through the prevalence of digital media
platforms that are in themselves a function of our mastery of light, as a means
of communication.
We now find ourselves
leaving in a cultural milieu that disdains the truth, scientia, science
and knowledge, which undermines place of reason in public discourse.
In Western Europe the
so-called dark ages are considered to have begun around the year 500 CE, with
the reign of the emperor Justinian, roughly the same length of time seven
hundred and fifty years after the golden age of the philosophers, and roughly seven
hundred and fifty years before Saint Thomas wrote his Summa.
Let me be clear, I am
not suggesting that there is anything inherently ominous in the pattern I have
articulated, the numbers themselves are arbitrary and it would be unreasonable
to suppose otherwise. However, we would be wise to acknowledge this, the
descent of darkness has a cycle all of its own. We have fallen into this before
and we are susceptible to falling into it again, once we have fallen, it could
take centuries to emerge back into the light.