This here blog had 1554 unique visitors in March 2004, and out of them 18 added it to their favorites. There was a typo in the February stats—that should have been 1119 unique visitors, not 119. There were 16 posts last month, so my rate of publication is increasing. FP’s top two referrers are sites I’ve never heard of and one is in an oriental language I can’t even read. Across, Beyond, Through is the top referrer that I know is legit. Thank you, Rev. Parker. “Bart Ehrman” continues to be the top search phrase bringing browsers to this site. I hope you find what you’re looking for. It’s still a crawly Amphibian in the TTLB Ecosystem.
For those who missed FP’s April Fools get up, you can still see what you missed here.
Finally, Facilitating Paradox turns a year old on April 12. I’m not sure what I’m going to do for the occasion, but keep an eye out for something special.
What Excites me About Socks
(This entry requires at least a modicum of explanation… I had started a draft of a paper on what excites me about knitting socks, but had to leave it for several eventful days, and now that I return to it I can’t quite remember where I put that yarn. I was more or less brainstorming extemporaneously, rather than logically putting my socked foot in my mouth. This is what remains, and I’m undecided on what I’m going to do with it…)
What excites me most about knitting socks is summed up in a term I have coined: sockism. The lack of any toes in most socks and the fact that we don’t have opposable thumbs on our feet is vibrant and refreshing. To start with the foundation that all members of the community have two feet to stand on and that we all have ten toes (or embrace anyone who doesn’t.) This is the basis of true peace, lasting shalom. This is most easily described and understood as making nice wool socks amongst ourselves. Such warm, wool socks, especially when they are bright and colorful, have the potential to bridge differences of belief and unite disparate podiatricalogical and sole perspectives.
I am excited about the truth in the old proverb that you can judge a foot by its sock. Our skimble-skamble heritage affirms this by nodding to people’s feet, not their meat. As someone who stands on my own two feet, I believe it is my path to assist people in assessing their sock options based on the toes and the heels they bring to their lives, through their feet, ankles and shins. This process of legwork is much more open and therefore rewarding in knitting socks because it is not tied down to any particular color or texture of thread.
And yet, contemporary fiddlesticks are inheritors of a whangdoodle heritage that we should be proud of. Historically the flimflam and flummadiddle organizations have been on the forefront of sock justice and foot covering movements amongst most jiggery-pokery organizations. Our socks have been prophetic and inspirational.
Why is there anything at all, and not rather nothing?
in line for execution
watching others strapped in, terrified
one by one bodies keeling over
bodies falling over lifeless.
Being led to the chair
being strapped down in dread.
I am much more courageous
than I feared I would be.
Seeing the crowd gathered,
I face my death with grim resolve
surprisingly calm
feeling the jolt
feeling the pain
as it increases
burning my flesh
and my awareness passing beyond…
I remembered this during my Intro to Christian Ethics class today. We were learning about the mystical body of Christ. This is a teaching of Paul’s, the key text being Colossians 1:17, “God is before all things, and in God all things are held together.”
Is the mystical body of Christ only a metaphor, as in all these separate individuals making up the body of the Church; or is Paul really speaking of an ontological understanding of being, as in a relational concept of being? Western understanding is that being is the sum total of all things, but this is problematic. Life is more than what we can see, touch, and quantify empirically. The mystical body is therefore not about things.
Edmund Husserl states that “consciousness is always consciousness of something.” Subject and object are always given together, but being includes both in relationship.
Subject & Object in Relation = Being
Conceiving of God as a thing is idolatry, reifying, ‘thingifying’. But God is not a thing. Paul’s mystical body is relational: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. God is closer to no-thingness than to somethingness. As someone once put it: all we ever get to see of God is his backside as God passes by—every time we try to focus on God, God disappears.
Every thing is contrasted by the dread of our own death, the potential of our own nothingness. There is no “I am” apart from “I am not.”
This understanding makes clear some baffling statements of Jesus: “Where two or more are gathered in my name, there I am among them.” He doesn’t say, “where one is, there I am,” because he is in the relationship between them. “In as much as you have done to/for the lowest ones, so have you done to me.” It’s relational:
This understanding leads to the realization that Christ’s resurrection was not of the physical body, but of the relational body of being. This realization is most easily seen in love, especially erotic love where one merges with one’s lover and goes outside one’s limited bodily experience.
Some concrete illustrations of this understanding:
Friends function as mirrors to the self.
In fetal development the mind doesn’t develop without interaction with the human community.
Ecology is the queen of science. Modern physics understands relationships at the macro and micro level to be a symbiosis of subject and object.
The relationship is more important than the objects in relation. Basic reality is:
God, Ourselves, and Our Neighbors are all Related
We always have problems whenever we try to collapse this triangle.
Thus, the end of my poem is
I wake up.
Opportunities Falling Into My Lap
A couple weeks ago I interviewed for an interfaith internship working with labor unions for worker justice, called Seminary Summer. It’s a joint project of the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice and the AFL-CIO. It’s a ten week paid internship including one week of training in Chicago. I felt the phone interview went well, and found out just the other day that I have been approved for the program by both organizations. There are still two major hurdles before this is a done deal. On their end, they are working to find a supervisor and placement for me in the Columbus area. Currently the closest they have is in Cleveland or Cincinnati. On my end, since this will be a full-time, flexible hours job, I’d have to quit my part-time tech-support work. I won’t qualify for a leave of absence so there’s no assurance I’d have my job back at the end of the summer. That said, the coordinator of the program called earlier this week to say she’d be in Columbus next Tuesday and maybe I’d like to meet her in person. I told her that would be great, but that I could do her one better: Tuesday is Consortium Day, the day when students, faculty, and staff from all three Central Ohio seminaries get together, and this year Methesco is hosting it. I’ve announced her visit to Trinity Lutheran Seminary and the Pontifical College Josephinum. She’ll be available after the Consortium Day events to speak about this program to other students and staff. We would like to start up a permanent NICWJ group here.
My son’s dedication is Sunday, and we’re excited making preparations for that. The UU minister who’s doing the ceremony has been very helpful in my own preparation for ministry, and she and I have spoken in the past about the possibilities for me doing a congregational internship in her church. I am scheduled to have lunch with her on Monday to discuss funding options. Meanwhile, the school’s Field Education office sent a flyer out yesterday saying they have several grants available for new and creative ministry positions. The $4K amount (for a full school year) is tiny, but it’s a start, and I’m sure she and I can put our heads together to make it fit into something bigger. I’m hoping to be able to start some kind of ministry position soon…
A fellow UU student friend was marveling at how ministry opportunities just fall into your lap. (I sure didn’t share that sentiment my first year and a half at seminary.) She had expressed this after I told her about the Seminary Summer interview. She wasn’t aware of the other bees in my bonnet, but it’s too soon to share much about the third one. I’m very excited about all three of these opportunities. It does seem that they have just been falling into my lap. I’m hoping and praying that I can finally say goodbye to SARCOM and be more fully on the path to ministry.
The List Keeps Getting Longer
While I’ve been busy doing other things, not posting anything to this blog, spammers have been busy posting rude and/or obscene comments to it. I don’t know if they would stop if I posted more often, but they sure are annoying, especially when one spammer posts nearly a dozen comments in one day. If you’re interested in marketing drugs or adult-only web sites, go somewhere else. I have a zero-tolerance policy for offensive comments. Once you post anything not remotely related to my own post, you’re henceforth banned from ever posting comments again. Likewise with email. Any sender that gets marked as ‘junk’ mail will never be seen in my inbox again. The lists of banned IP addresses (prohibited from posting comments to this blog,) and blocked email addresses keep getting longer and longer. I’ve got better things to do with my time.
Is Life a Struggle or a Dance
I asked a baby,
“Is life a struggle or a dance?”
and in reply,
It hugged its mom a bit closer.
I asked a young man,
“Is life a struggle or a dance?”
and in reply,
He hurried off to start his day.
I asked a lady,
“Is life a struggle or a dance?”
and in reply,
She carefully made up her face.
I asked an old crone,
“Is life a struggle or a dance?”
and in reply,
She winked at me twinklin’ her eye.
These lyrics have music to accompany them, written in 1993
Ad Paradox
I thought of a way to advertise my own blog. On the front of a t-shirt this would be printed:
The statement on the back of this t-shirt is true. www.facilitatingparadox.com
On the back, the following:
The statement on the front of this t-shirt is false. www.facilitatingparadox.com
🙂
FP Stats – January 2004
January traffic was up: 1231 unique visitors, a 21% increase over December. The post of my sermon, “Give Praise!” had the most reads, with “Bart Ehrman on Fresh Air!” coming in second. My papers on YHWH, suicide, UU sacraments, and Sufi Sam were also popular. As in previous months, Google was the top referrer after direct address or bookmark. Oddly enough, the top referring site for January was a Paris Hilton Video blog on Blogspot, but I was unable to find a link, (either hyper or contextual.) “bart ehrman” was the top search keyphrase, and most other search phrases and words had to do with paradox. It’s estimated that 12 visitors added this site to their Favorites last month. Thank you! I also see that FP is now a Flippery Fish in the TTLB Ecosystem. That’s the highest it’s been yet! And now The Truth Laid Bear is offering Java script to automatically keep your own blog updated as to its status in the ecosystem. Watch for that on the FP home page.
Also, stay tuned: I have something special planned for April, to celebrate one year in the blogosphere, and to celebrate another holiday that month.
This Old House, continued
I came up with a catchy quote the other day, but I suspect it’s not original: “The purpose of life is to learn how to die.”
This was stimulated by a discussion I’m participating in at a local congregation on the topic of teleology, or the question of life’s ultimate purpose. Before you read the discussion contributions, you might want to first read the sermon talk-before introduction. This is all part of Rev. Susan Ritchie’s series of sermons entitled, “Our House, Our Theology,” which I also began reflecting on in this blog last month.
This most recent discussion and sermon is actually part three in the series. The first part was on theology, or Unitarian Universalist understandings of God, or G∞d, or the Holy. The unifying theme in all our various concepts of divinity is that we hold each other accountable for them, whatever they are. We recognize that our construct of that which is greater than us has a lot to do with who we are and how we relate to the world. Rev. Ritchie compares this to the foundation of the UU house in which we members live.
The second part in the series was on soteriology, or salvation. (I’m using traditional theological terms with the understanding that they are historically what have been used to label such topics, while also recognizing that many UUs today would be unfamiliar, if not uncomfortable, with the baggage they carry.) This second session stimulated a lively online conversation, touching on our concept of grace, comparing ‘salvation’ to ‘enlightenment,’ and sharing personal life-shaping experiences. Rev. Ritchie compares this to the roof of our UU house.
This week’s topic of end goals has wound itself throughout the reading and reflection from my first week of classes. (This integration is typical of seminary study, and one of the things I love about it.) In my Intro to Christian Ethics class I learned that there is no experience that is not interpreted; in other words, the only way we know the world at all is through language, which is culturally informed and imprinted. It also follows that the only way we can be self-reflexive or know ourselves is through language as well. Our instructor used the example of Helen Keller as illustrative: until she realized that someone was spelling the word ‘water’ on her palm, she had no idea that there were others in the world like her, she had no individual self-concept. I’ve heard before how infants are supposed to have no understanding of the separation between themselves and their surroundings. Our teacher mentioned that Buddhists view this as not having a self-identity until we’ve told our first lie. There’s isn’t the only philosophy that aims at returning to nothingness or merging back into the impersonal ground of being.
Yet I can’t help thinking that human life is meant for something more than returning to the place where we began. This brings me back around to the discussion on teleology, in which I said that growth is central to my understanding of life’s purpose. If an individual self-identity—and, more importantly, the wealth of relationships made possible by that conception—is something we grow into, why would we think that the goal of life is to get or grow out of it? That seems a bit backward to me, but next Tuesday I’ll be in a class discussion on the ethical implications of these things, which the instructor has already hinted at. I’ll let you know more as it strikes me!
Oh yeah, and Rev. Ritchie compares teleology to the door to our fine UU house.
A Good Read
I’m currently reading a 9th-Century classic of Saxon literature: The Heliand. In fact, I’ve started writing a reflection paper on it for class. This is a fascinating recasting of the gospel story set in tribal Europe. I recommend it for anyone interested in that time-period or interested in how the life and death of Jesus can be reworked into another context. This particular translation does not rhyme, as does the original manuscript, but it stays true to the author’s intent. Thought I’d share.