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p/c Nelli Chaitanya via unspalsh
Agamben suggests a similar thing is happening now: simultaneous hyper-expanison of techno-bureaucratic systems of control and governance and increasing despair about the average person’s role in those systems (e.g. trying to get IT assistance with the IRS help-desk, “look I’m trying to do the right thing and pay my taxes" can you just tell me how to reset my password?”).
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In the midst of this interview we get down to what one of my teachers, David Field, has dubbed “the DeepReal” —the honest pit of longing and desire at the center of the human person. The DeepReal is that place Freud and Jung were fond of making their targets; the Desert Fathers too. In that place is identity, affection, cravings, habits, idols, problems with Mom, issues with Dad, that-terrible-thing-i-did-that-day-that-ill-never-tell-anyone-about-ever, etc., and, importantly, God. Indeed, it is the very place to which the Lord descends in his salvation of us. He does not just apply gospel like a coat of exterior paint, or goatskin on Jacob’s arms. He goes all the way down to the DeepReal place.
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p/c Viva Luna Studios via unsplash
Often we are prone to think that what Biblical prophecies “do” in Scripture is to foretell future events, like “writing the news before it happens” or something. Under this kind of imagination, then, the only real differences between Biblical Prophecy and the palm reader at the local county fair are (1) accuracy, and (2) divine sanction. The Bible’s allowed to do it because it’s God doing it, and he’s reliable because he’s God. The fortune-teller, however, is neither reliable nor allowed to do it, even when they’re accurate. [INSERT summer-camp sermon about the witch of Endor].
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p/c Toa Heftiba via unsplash
The connection with fire is not unimportant, it is not a scribal addition, nor is it a signal that what Moses is recording is a “stream of consciousness” mode of divine speech —like YHWH could have profited from cue cards. No. There is in the mind of YHWH a unique link between household fires being kindled and the sabbath. And though there are several things we could do with this link, there is one that I have become fixated on as of late…
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from Sabbath Morn, by Edward Robert Hughes (1851–1914)
…We use the concepts of “24” (hrs) and “7” (days a week) but under a regime of 24/7 those numbers become meaningless. What makes a week a week? Why stop counting at 24? What makes a day a day? Jonathan Crary notes that although “[c]onventional and older durational units persist (like “nine to five” or “Monday to Friday”)” theses are all ultimately subordinated to “all the practices of individual time management made possible by 24/7 networks and markets” (2014: 57)...
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Here is the sketch of an altarpiece, a Triptych if you will, I’d create if I was the master of a medieval artists’ guild. It is also a theological reflection on Pentecost… after all: all art is a theological reflection, for better or for worse.
Pannel 1. ‘Over the waters of the Deep’
The Spirit, painted in bright lazurite chiaroscuro and gold-white against otherwise total darkness…
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When we say the Creed we are giving eye-witness testimony: I believe in the Resurrection of Jesus from the Dead because I see that same Life at work in me, and in us…
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p/c Christina Rumpf via unsplash
The rainbow is a creature of light, established by God in the heavens as a sign of his mercy and his promise never again to flood the entire earth (Gen 9:13-17). The colors, the range of brightness and hue, the blurring and fading, and twinkling of the rainbow is a part of the glory of God. A rainbow radiates from the sacred fane of the One seated on the Throne of Heaven (Ezek. 1:27; Rev. 4:3). There is a rainbow of mercy and loving kindness which diadems the Living Lord. It is both mercy and beauty that draw us to Him. The very act of hanging-up his bow of war emboldens us to draw near with faith (Heb. 4:16).
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p/c Coronel G via unsplash
…Having witnessed the papal election, news media and pundits have begun taking the project farther still: they intend to predict action and the course of the Roman Catholic Church. So high is their estimation of their own powers of probabilistic ramification that the pitch has already reached a kind of drunkenness. Far behind us is the terminus of sanity, long have we been riding in the realm of derangement…
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Jesus rises from the dead, trampling down death by death, and yet, in all that trampling, he still bears the marks of his own being trampled-down. The risen Christ is a wounded Christ. If Christ is the Image of the Invisible God, and if seeing Jesus means seeing the Father (Jn. 14:9), we must bear it being asked, “what does it mean that the hands of the Hand of God have holes in them?” We hail Christ as the “Wounded Healer” mustn’t we pause to wonder more simply “what is a wound?” …
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