four things i thot today:

a) line from the poet and episcopal priest tim dlugos: each great hope seems/to melt away like snow beneath the force/of the spring, the waking life again" i am working away, slowly and difficulty from systems that contain all to build a life upon--the melting snow, with the feeding water, and the intemperate schedule, and the refusal to have a system, is a metaphor for that?
b) the red and white blocks devolped for testing spatial relations were created in the early 50s at STandford, b/w 1950 and 1970 stanford had several pysch expirments intended towards placing the chaotic into mediated boxes--can this kind of pyschometric testing be connected to Reichs gender work or to the Prison Expriment
c) isaac, being lead by the patriach, to his death or at least sacrifice, we hear the story from Abraham's point of view, in art, in lit, in the scriptures, but is our rship to G-d closer to Isaac than Abraham (and by extension, Jacob knew that he would get the blessnig, and in the wrestling and the maiming and hte lingustic changes, there was really rarely any doubt--the story of Isaac is a crime story, a noir, it has suspense)
d) winters tale as a mirror of midsummers night dream?

ase

As much as I love chart country, and find it oddly inspirational, I have always found the exquisitely construction of Twain's work was made in such a way that any biographical clue was meticulously scrubbed clean. So the songs weren't about anything, even the sex songs refused narratives of the body--so we think b/c of the show on the Oprah network, and because of the hiring of Swift's team who make confessional work, and because of what we know of the divorce, that she has become more confessional...but it's not true. This is slightly sadder then, for example, Come on Over, but gives no new understanding of Twain. Artists don't need to spill shit, we have no real knowledge of Toby Keith, who makes almost no attempt at the personal or the confessional, and an instinct towards the confessional seems to required more of female artists then men, so part of me really admires the chrome sheen of Twain's immaculate production, and part of me still finds it a little too bland to enjoy as a text, or even the use function that she assumes it will (but then i might not be the audience for this) (the interesting thing is that the youtube video recommends videos of the motivational speaker Joe Osteen as a companion to this--and I'm enough of a prickly asshole that I'm allergic about this shit. )

the politics of the tree of life were lousy, the abstacted, vigentte style story tellijng a little wearying, the last third a goopy hippy disaster, his spirtualism and his pangeic theology as a corrective to the european (this time xianity) interesting, and the 30 minute section about the creation of the earth, from the big bang, to the 50s in texas was one the most beautiful things ive seen in the cinema (esp a tiny, few second cut of a sea dinasour, and a slightly longer scene of two raptors)

also, the only film that had sections set in the present day, and oh brad pitt was great.

"Imagine a stream flowing form a spring and dividing itself off into a number of accidental channels. As long as it proceeds so, it will be useless for any purpose of agriculture, the dissipation of its waters making each particular current small and feeble, and therefore slow. But if one were to mass these wandering and widely dispersed rivulets again into one single channel, he would have a full and collected stream for the supplies which life demands. Just so the human mind . . . as long as its current spreads itself in all directions over the pleasures of the senses, has no power that is worth the naming of making its way towards the Real Good; but once call it back and collect it upon itself . . . it will find no obstacle in mounting to higher things, in grasping realities."

gregory of nyssa, qouted here

Sunday, June 12, 2011

If you are ever in a masonic lodge, note the leader’s chair, to the right is a rough stone, and to the left is a smooth stone, the stones, called ashar’s are a visual metaphor for the linear narrative of rough to smooth that exist w/i a mason’s life.

They assume that you are born rough, and thru received knowledge, given by elders, one becomes smooth. But the way the display works, the rough and the smooth are in the same place, the rough and the smooth work not as a narrative but through a perhaps inadvertent, example of mystic time, or church t ime, where it folds up in on itself, where it functions simultaneously, and where a narrative requires enough liquidity to suggest that the rite occurs from the beginning of time, that it never ends, that persons who engage in the rite are changed, are smoothed, but that the smoothing lacks the permance of existience.

The ashars, the dialectic of the smooth and rough that suggests thru placement and thought, two narratives: the narrative of linear progression, I was rough and now I am smooth; I was lost and now I am found; I was in the wilderness, and now I am home in the city; I was a pagan or an atheist or one who refused g-d, and now I am a Christian. But also the narrative of mutual displacement, of decoherence, of a fractal splitting: I am both rough and smooth; though I am found, I still do not speak enough of the language, and am lost; even in the city I am in the wild’s exodous, my conversion to this new life, and to this new theological practice has not made me less of what I was before.

Here on pentacost, which is in most tales, a story of the voice of god speaking clearly and precisely his convenats towards the divine, is like those ashars—there is a linear narrative, that shouldn’t be denied, that there is a miracle of communication, of language, of transference—of being one thing, and then after this radical event, being another thing, but there is also the decoherence, the splitting, the dark seeing, and the terror that comes from the voice of the divine.

We get to easter, as a community—and Christ comes back from the dead, and the flesh of God is obvious. Pentacost works as a second easter, or the second part of easter—where the flesh, the narratives, the responsilbities that were given to us, on the cross become gifts of the spirit—gifts that require a collective responsibility.

But these gifts are often confusing and contradictory, they are often difficult, and they are explicitly in Acts gifts of an apocalypse that we are still waiting for. To understand these acts, we have to recognize the message comes in a variety of forms—there is the gift of language, a reversal, a mirroring, of the curse of Babel. There is the recognition of time, where it functions as an eddy, that floats forwards, backwards, curves in on itself, and provides a place to rest—a time of eternity, where the Eucharist of the Passion is the same Eucharist as Luther in Wittenberg, and the one we have today, and the one that will occur 200 years hence…and the Pentecost is the same way, the passing of the peace, the gathering together as a community, the language used toe express the ineffable become part of the constant renewing of the divine in the life of the church—some of that renewing is difficult, some of that renewing brings joy, and sometimes, we fail to view it as constant. These three messages-of language, of pluarity, and how they fold into a desire for cohesive wholeness, can be eeked out.

Think of the tower of babel not as a curse. We went about it the wrong way, our desire to know God fully collapsed into hubris, but the strong human instinct to work thru the mystery, to talk to god, and to have god talk to us, collectively and personally, comes out of that tower of babel—and when that tower collapsed, it was the birth of language itself—hundreds of languages, there needed to be some work, some process that allowed people to figure out how to talk to each other, now that they did not have the same tounge, but this allowed for different ideas, different perspectives, it allowed for a variety of ways to describe our experiences.

In this sense, Pentacost could be considered a reward for the chaos, a positive spin of the difficulties of Babel’s tower—that God, in the form of the holy spirit, speaks many languages, to a collective group of people, suggests an openness that is perhaps a bit absent in other places—it is not Abraham on the mountain, ready to kill Isaac, it is not Moses removing his shoes and entering the burning bush, it is not Ezekiel or even Christ revealing himself to two confused and frightened disciples during the transfiguration.

This inter-textual, liturgical attachment of this passage, to the passage about the passing of peace , “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”

This leads us to a number of questions, can we communicate to god without terror, is the terror and awe of god absent here, with the wind and the voice of fire, and what does it mean to absorb, to listen to the voice of God in this context—in the words of the pentacost miracle:” in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?”

The seeking of peace and the seeking of meaning, happen together, they happen in a mutally agreed upon community—and a community that is radically different then the tight and restricted community of the Isrealites. The theophonic miracle of the Pentacost, is then not only a miracle of language, the rough and smooth stone of translation and understanding on both sides of the Chair of God, it is also a collective miracle, a miracle about the implications of plurality.

Pluraity in the pentacost is not an easy argument, and it is not often pleasant—it rests on several paradoxes that the Anglican church is still working through. That human communities who rest on religious practice work through. The chief paradox is one of open and closed communities. To be part of the community of faith, t here must be an agreement of what is being said, and also an agreement of which interperations, which positions are so beyond the pale that t hey cannot be said. The diversity of opinions, must contain within it, the seeds of its own dissent. In this sense, to hear the voices of god, in their own language are to simultaneously lose part of the identity that is being preserved.

This question rests on the two passages—the one in Acts, about the list of people, like the midrash or kabbalsitic lists in the Babel tales, that note each of the tribes, each of the nations that was created that day and on the passage in corninthons that states that we must become Christians, and to become Christian require an abandonment of old ways. The paradoxical thought process here is, how can we be both now, both open to the possibility of a radical god, open to the dissent that emerges in other voices, how do we mirror or transform, or listen to the holy spirit so the miracle of the babel has now become a gift while recognizing heresy—how do we know what is permitted, and what is beyond reasonable interpretation.

This grasping for interperation, for a proper limning of the voice of God, rests on the body of the Lord, it is through the flesh of the divine made human that the pentacost can happen, and it is because Christ’s body is our body that we can work through these thoughts and feelings collectively For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. But this is also paradoxical: so we are made to be slaves, and in our slavery, we are free, we are made men or women, but thru the flesh of a man, we are made genderless—but all of this seeing and hearing and making and constructing and finding a collective is through a glass darkly, because of our humanity, we are absent of a full understanding of the nature of god—the Pentecost makes that clear: And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist

This is the difficult bit, the problematic bit—that the blood and the fire and the smoky mist consumes us, but consumes us in such a way that we are not fully processed—we are the smooth stone and the rough stone, and we are a smooth stone and rough stone in contexts of other smooth stones and rough stones—we are made into a wall, or a fence, a face that delinates land, ownership, collective responsibility, the commons—but also exclusion, and loss and collapse.

To be a stone in the wall, to be an aggregate—could this be a successful metaphor for cohesive wholeness—the tension between what is said and what is heard, is a tension that is not solveable, because language is always liquid, is always at risk of slipping away from us, and we talk, we listen, we write, we pray, we engage in physical rituals connected to the timelessness of our encounters with fellow believers, and with the nature of god, in the hope that our desires for communication are not futile.

The joy of pentacost for Christians, is a joy of language and social cohesion as a temporary hopeful interaction against the feelings of hopelessness at a God that is often viewed as profoundly absent. It’s not the speaking in tounges, or the ecstatic dancing that marks other peoples working through of the spirit, but it’s still and it’s small and its enough to keep me waiting for the voice of fire, even thru the blood and the flesh and the smoke