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

Easter And Secularism

April 20, 2018
Year 3, Day 110 | No Comments
Section of Adoration of the Magi, artist unknown

I am writing this early in the morning of Easter Sunday, 2014 – in the 92nd year of my life.  Easter fell late in the calendar this year. We have just passed through a severe winter, with snow depths measured among the highest in 150 years, and with more than commonly cold temperatures in thirty years.  Last Thursday, we had a snowfall of about 12 inches that clung to trees and shrubs creating a fairy land of beauty, and a travel land of danger.  Lateness of the snowfall caused a litany of remarks that were dungeon-like in conversations.  Yesterday, I went to the church to coach my elder son in his reading of the conversion of the Apostle Paul, in… Read more

Paradox or Contradiction

April 19, 2018
Year 3, Day 109 | No Comments
Section of The Descent from the Cross, Rogier van der Weyden, c. 1435

Contradiction and paradox make up an important interest for me – high interest.  In my view the wise person does not sift through the issues of life and faith without finding some way to manage contradiction and paradox.  They contain some secrets to understanding how to balance life and understanding, in both theory and reality.  I wonder about the wisdom views of Solomon and the contradictions of his life. I wonder about how Peter could walk with Christ for a thousand days, and deny him, swearing, at the fire near the site of Christ’s crucifixion.  I wonder about Demas, so important to the ministry of the Apostle Paul, abandoning the Apostle, but seeming to recover later.  I wonder about the contradictions… Read more

Discipline

April 18, 2018
Year 3, Day 108 | No Comments
Section of The Taking of Christ, Caravaggio, 1602

In the context of freedom, the individual is called of God to disciplined life.  Freedom means that the individual must self-choose, and maintain control to carry through firmly on constructive resolutions – if that person expects to gain fulfillment so to be unapologetic either to self or God.  In this there is a sense of righteousness in the quality of one’s life, not necessarily related to professional and social contexts.  It is likely that the pattern will spill over to the social and professional contexts as well, but those entities may be so influenced by forces out of our control that anything we may do, will not assure success, as success is measured in the entity.  For example, we may… Read more

Distortion

April 17, 2018
Year 3, Day 107 | No Comments
Section of The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci

How will we ever work through the human context with love, peace, creativity, truth and the sense of fulfillment for life meaning?  Philosophers do not agree, nor do the varieties of academicians, religionists, cultures, common sense citizens, business and physical gurus – and so the list lengthens.  The tensions are not only between this and that group, but found within ranges of differences within a context.  Persons find it difficult to live within the context of their own beliefs, even passions.  How may their neighbors fare in what they are told to do when even social heroes mess things up?  For some years there seemed to be a break-through to teach the public how to reduce grief by accepting the… Read more

Complexity

April 16, 2018
Year 3, Day 106 | No Comments

We like and dislike simplicity and complexity.  We wish matters were more simplistic in contexts than we find them, and we are suspicious of what appears to us in complex explanations.  At the same time we wonder about the explanations we receive, but feel the scholarly and thoughtful persons have the better explanations, especially in relationship to the fields of their expertise.  During my adult life few persons doubted the complex explanations of Einstein.  Most persons have no idea what he said or believed although they might readily recognize E=mc2.  It makes some persons feel intellectual.  Writers struggle with sentence structure – to use simple declarative sentences or not to use simple declarative sentences.  Hemingway made a lot of money… Read more

Suffering as System

April 15, 2018
Year 3, Day 105 | No Comments
Section of Christ and the Woman of Samaria, Benedetto Luti, 1715-20

Suffering is a physical and spiritual problem for mankind.  It is attacked on the physical/intellectual level with vigor by society.  The time and fortune dedicated to the research of illness, physical, psychological, social, even spiritual are virtually impossible to calculate.  The economies of advanced nations are highly dependent upon this massive use of human time resources to treat the health of persons, nature, society, government, economies, and institutions.  Everything appears subject to some mind of illness, troublesome to greater or lesser degrees, defined in the context in which they function.  So prevalent is suffering that it has become a theme of many humanists, that if there is a God, he doesn’t appear to offer adequate relief, or in the reality… Read more

Intimacy

April 14, 2018
Year 3, Day 104 | No Comments
Section of The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci

To follow the media, visual and auditory, we would never learn the meaning of intimacy as God would have it experienced.  We begin at the beginning for understanding of the human condition.  Adam was alone, except that God maintained a relationship with him that we may call intimate in that it was not given to any other animal-like creature with which Adam or God had to do.  Of the animals of the Garden, Adam was given a literal characteristic (image from God, who has no physical type of image/ except in Christ) that set him apart from other animals, and made Adam above the animals although sharing physical characteristics of animals.  Since the divine characteristic (image) was vouchsafed to mankind,… Read more

Ordinary

April 13, 2018
Year 3, Day 103 | No Comments
Section of The Crucifixion, Pedro Orrente, ca. 1625–30

What is written here relates to the emphasis of the theme of the ordinary for this date in what has preceded and will follow in these Pages.  That emphasis should gain considerable attention in our discussion about mortal life and spiritual meaning.  Currently (2014) there are several writers trying to revive an interest in the glory of the ordinary.  The concept has long been a part of me in sheer glory of life, in both human (reflective) life and divine (spiritual).  I resonate with Albert Schweitzer’s concept on reverence for life, while also having difficulty with some of his theology.  So great has it been that I have believed that reality of life (mortality) is a gift of God so… Read more

Eminence

April 12, 2018
Year 3, Day 102 | No Comments
Section of The Infant Jesus and St. John the Baptist, Guido Reni, n.d.

Eminence is in the values of the beholder.  Some self-eminence is yearned for in the individual.  For the Christian, well oriented biblically, the matter of eminence is clear in that the individual Christian wants to be eminent (highly regarded and approved by God).  That eminence only now and then is recognized in society, and even then may appear long after the deaths of the persons gaining human eminence.  The societies of the world know little of the identity of eminent persons, even achievers by the rules of secular societies.  The persons I am noting here are deserving of the honor afforded them by the granting of eminence to them.  My concept of eminence is that the person gaining it has… Read more

Relationships

April 11, 2018
Year 3, Day 101 | No Comments
Section of The Crucifixion, Pedro Orrente, ca. 1625–30

The friendship between David and Jonathan deserves our contemplation so to measure our friendships, or any human relationships for understanding and our own practices.  The truncated story has served me well and made me a better person in relationships.  Those relationships grow out of the principles of love in Scripture that the base of love is found in the nature of God who loves mankind no matter what an individual in the mass of individuals may believe or do.  Simply, Christian love is found in the individual and is pervasive, not relying on the object of love.  Love in this meaning generates from the gift from God that makes a loving person.  Jonathan was a loving person, and made David… Read more

← Newer posts
Older posts →