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p/c Shaira Dela Peña via unspalsh
Love may begin as a feeling or an event or an arrangement or an accident, but it cannot remain thus…. “The task of love consists in justifying in deed that meaning of love which at first is given only in feeling.”
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p/c ‘Costae,’ Marketa Klimasova, public domain image via wikimedia commons
This week I want to consider a lie, a kind of perfidious falsehood which settles like fallout on those who believe its speech, that runs something like “Do I belong in this church? There’s no one else like me here…”
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p/c Andrew Seaman via unsplash
In a parish like All Saints Honolulu it is easy to be plagued by that phenomena which C.S. Lewis describes as “The Inner Ring” —that overwhelming desire to be a part of some group-within-a-group where the really real things happen. Our lives (especially at places of belonging, like church) undergo the constant ebb-and-flow of “the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.”
The “Inner Ring” phenomena casts a kind of illusion, confusing us about the goal of life in the Body of Christ…
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p/c James Coleman via unsplash
The magnificent Oliver O’Donnovan treats the question of the Presence of Christ in the Sacraments as not a matter of substances but of time.
This is where very many medieval and reformational debates got bogged-down: by making it a matter of stuff and not a question of eschatology… Let me summarize a few things…
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p/c Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27611785
Samson is a Nazirite: he is a holy warrior, divinely called upon to a lived vow and a consecrated life before the Lord (Jdg 13:5; cf. Num. 6:1-21). He is also a Bridegroom, riddle-maker, trickster, and mighty man of valor.
His name comes from the Hebrew word for sun, shamash. Like the Sun he is a little ruler in Israel (cf. Gen 1:17). He is brights rising star of redemption in Israel.
His fall is not merely one more event in a long sequence of degeneracies. It is an apocalyptic event, the death of the Sun…
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p/c Isaac Blessing Jacob, (1642), Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, Metropolitan Museum of Art, courtesy of wikimedia commons
I was asked a few weeks ago during the Song of Solomon bible study I lead on Sunday mornings to explain what I meant in a passing comment I made about Isaac the patriarch forsaking the covenant.
My basic claim was something like this: For all of Jacob’s other short-comings, failures, sins, he is not acting sinfully or wrongfully during his early encounter with his brother Esau nor in his collusion with his mother to get his father’s (Isaac’s) blessing…
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p/c Ferdinand Schmutzer (1870–1928), public domain, courtesy of wikimedia commons
Sigmund Freud did not believe in love —did not believe that humans were capable of it. “He insisted that it was the illusory result of a narcissistic passion for one’s own I, or rather, one’s own narcissistic ideal” Mossimo Recalcati explains (2021, p.9).
Freud, according to Recalcati, “believed that to love means nothing more than to adore one’s own ideal image embodied by the beloved” (ibid). Thus when someone says “I love you” what Freud believed was actually going-on was nothing more the person declaring “‘I love myself through you’” (ibid).
Now, enough of us have experienced the brokenness of sin to know that this is sometimes true…
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p/c Jametlene Reskp via unsplash
There’s a critical piece to the ending of Collodi’s original tale of Pinocchio which has been left out of every version I ever encountered. It’s not in the Golden Books version nor in the Disney cartoon version. Today I read the end of Collodi’s original (M. Murray trans., New York: E.P. Dutton, 1956) and was absolutely stunned by it. It goes like this…
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Jacques Fénoux as Hippolytus in the Comédie-Française production of Phèdre. Photograph by Atelier Nadar. Pubic Domain courtesy of wikimedia commons.
Theramenes’ advice (above) is —like most folly— spun in threads of silvery truths. He is encouraging his master, Hippolytus, to follow his growing affection for Aricia, the foreign princess which his father (king Theseus) holds captive in the palace.
Hippolytus has grown to love her and she him, though their peoples are at war. One can imagine a montage in which the two of them sing “…there may be something there that wasn’t there before…” from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991).
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p/c Stephen Radford via unsplash
Our service was cancelled yesterday due to inclement weather and damages sustained by the facility we used.
This means the notes which I had prepared for the homily lay in unpreached, wedged where I left them, folded and stuffed in the margin between the beginning of the Gospel of Luke (on the left-hand side of the page) and the account of Mary visitation to Elizabeth (on the right-hand side)…
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