Daily pages of reflection...for knowledge, understanding, to wisdom
Section of The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci Section of The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci

Self Counseling

May 4, 2019
Year 4, Day 124 | No Comments
Section of Adoration of the Magi, artist unknown

For decades I casually tracked the popular media counselors.  They varied in their approaches, but a common oversight reduced their effectiveness.  They tended to give too much favor to the seekers who wrote to them, although they handed off, sometimes with a bit of sarcasm, to those who were terribly shallow, crude, for piling it on too heavily against their adversaries.  The old general approach worked rather well for interest, entertainment, with some solutions, and celebrity counselors became household friends to millions of readers.  At this writing there is something of a turn that significantly improves mass media communication for the agony columns and electronic systems dealing with personal orientations.  Instead of focusing on the persons complained against, the counsel… Read more

Listening Deeply

May 3, 2019
Year 4, Day 123 | No Comments
Section of The Taking of Christ, Caravaggio, 1602

We need to remember that persons often think and act to their own disadvantage as well that of others not because they designed some nefarious way of life, but in the vast majority of instances, because of the faulty inborn human nature that often misleads us, especially during the formative years of our lives.  We sometimes become skittery in our minds, but feel driven nonetheless.  In our late years we acknowledge our early follies, perhaps laughing or deploring the errors of the past that could have been evaded.  Our response is likely motivated by the degree in which our mistakes were modest or extensive in consequence.  It is common for persons to fall into pitiful contexts that rob them of… Read more

Holiness

May 2, 2019
Year 4, Day 122 | No Comments
Section of Adoration of the Magi, artist unknown

Scripture informs us that we are, to win heaven’s citizenship, so to be twice born.  Both births have to do with the creative acts of God.  We are God’s children in two meanings, one physical and the other spiritual.  In the physical we can and do become truant to creation (natural) and to God (spiritual).  We demand of nature more and/or differently than it can give without our full agreement and cooperation.  Good people live in a disciplined context that makes the physical world a practical place, and on aggregate, increasing the length of life to the degree that nature’s laws permit – and are kept.  Had Adam/Eve maintained that original ideal they likely would have, at some point in… Read more

Culture

May 1, 2019
Year 4, Day 121 | No Comments
Section of Christ and the Adulteress, Lucas Cranach the Younger and Workshop, ca. 1545–50

For Christians, one of the great competitions they face in life is the tension between secular cultures, and Christian culture.  Society offers various cultures, but for our purposes, we will refer to the conglomerate as one so to accent the Christian.  Those cultures are obvious in racial contexts, and are admitted as African-American, or Asian-American, or, in the majority eclectic or largest division, simply American. Over time the majority culture usually incorporates parts of the many minority cultures, and vice versa. There may be the youth culture, the mid-life culture, and the culture of the elderly.  There are sub-divisions within these, so that we may have the boomers, the hippies, and others.  During some periods in a society one culture,… Read more

Perception For Good

May 1, 2019
Year 4, Day 121 | No Comments

Mankind is often unkind to mankind.  Note that the word often has been used here.  Society is something of a stew, made up of many ingredients, and often ingredients not used by the masses to make up their preferred society.  Individuals are formed in their own stew, made up by ingredients – some added from these sources and some from those sources.  Biology contributes its share.  Nationality, emotion, acquaintances and other factors, even language, participate in the collection and mixing of the ingredients.  Education and experience add and subtract along the way.  The result is sometimes edible and tasty, sometimes neither.  Almost always it is appreciated by some and rejected by others.  There is usually the feeling the stew might… Read more

Naivete

April 30, 2019
Year 4, Day 120 | No Comments
Section of Adoration of the Magi, artist unknown

On many issues mankind seems naive about the universe in human experience.  Often we seem to be tilting at windmills – as the old saying goes.  We identify presumed needs and make up responses to meet those needs that are often unsatisfactory to the problems acknowledged.  Consider the problem of evil.  Even for those who do not like common illusions conjured on the uses of words like evil and righteousness, there can be little doubt that there is something we can call evil in any context.  We are impressed by it in large violations like Hitler’s plans, or any one of a series of well-known pirates, criminals, murderers, thieves, and their colleagues.  When we have identified evil we have a… Read more

Counseling For Counsel

April 29, 2019
Year 4, Day 119 | No Comments
Section of Sistine Chapel ceiling, Michaelangelo, 1508-1512

This is being written just as the theme closes for the same date in the Junior series of Pages and written on the same date.  That Page may prove useful as an introduction to this one.  Anyone understanding human nature and the explanation for its meaning found in Scripture identifies with the summary word: depravity.  Depravity has been identified by ancient theologians as mankind is not able not to sin (non posse, non pecare).  Jesus is identified as the only person, bearing humanity in his person, who was not able to sin (non posse pecare).  To sin (again we keep matters simple for our space and purpose) is simply to violate the holiness of God so to make the person… Read more

Information

April 28, 2019
Year 4, Day 118 | No Comments
Section of The Descent from the Cross, Rogier van der Weyden, c. 1435

Intellectually we are both aided and crippled by the advances of this information age.  There has never been so much information revealing truth useful for effective knowledge and management as we have in current conditions.  The matter is so extensive that it is commonly referred to as information overload.  There is an old saying that there is a straw that breaks the camel’s back.  The camel is loaded with material to be transported, so heavily that another straw will break his back, and all will be lost for current transport, and the life of the camel.  Present developments in research and the mass of student/scholars at work in seeking something new to advance learnings in various fields have become so… Read more

Secularization

April 27, 2019
Year 4, Day 117 | No Comments
Section of Christ and the Adulteress, Lucas Cranach the Younger and Workshop, ca. 1545–50

Writing to the editors of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Michael Wedl, a consultant, argued: Right for is a form of semantic trickery that allows people to be perceived as good when they are merely reaping the most benefit for their cause.  I believe the writer is communicating a real point.  He uses the idea that if a mining venture is approved in a community as a right, so to increase employment in the area, perhaps to gain this or that additional advantage, but approved without consideration for persons in other communities where the drainage damages environments, there is no inherent right to the first group.  He is troubled that there seems to be an emerging use of rights to justify actions… Read more

Parenting

April 26, 2019
Year 4, Day 116 | No Comments
Section of Sistine Chapel ceiling, Michaelangelo, 1508-1512

Changes in the context of the American family likely had their largest impetus for change just after World War II.  The disruptions of the war triggered many human shifts, but the door was opened to a new pattern.  The boomer generation was born to be taken up with the future of the returning veterans of a young generation eager to take advantage of the economy recovered from the long depression of the 1930s.  Women felt they had gained in that they had taken over much of the production in the business markets during warfare, and were prepared to continue that involvement.  Some of the new leaders began doubting marriage and took consensual sexual liberation as a matter of equality.  (Some… Read more

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