Points of Interest

The careful reader ( I judge that there are perhaps as many as six readers of this blog worldwide ) of this blog will note some subtle changes in links and an increasing sparseness of postings.  I have friends who live in the blogosphere and one in particular who is a master of the art of blogging which is only to say that he has been at it, blogging, for nearly a decade and really at it, writing, for a lifetime.  Various factors have contributed to my dearth of postings over the last six months and my appraisal of these factors has changed over the months.  At first I attributed the decline in postings to technical issues not the least of which is the miserable nature of a dialup connection, and then to spam comments, spamments.  And now finally, I have come to see it as nothing more than a very delayed mid-life crisis.  I am nearing the end of the sixth decade of life and will be half way through the seventh decade when the last child graduates from high school.  From the last fact it should be easy to imagine that my history might be somewhat off the norm.  That history for me seems to demand some recounting, if not explanation, but for now any effort seems to be blocked by what at first seemed to be regret which has now turned to remorse.  Perhaps it is akin to K-R's stages of grief.  Perhaps the progression is regret, remorse and then reappraisal with final acceptance of what has been brought forward that is worthwhile and what can be left behind.  A tall order to pursue in writing for anyone but I'm sure my friend, the master blogger, would be the first to point out that the effort is well worth the time and pain.  So we begin again here today with the bare minimum, nothing more than perhaps what is diary entry, some recent points of interest from the radio and the magazines.

 

Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene

Fresh Air from WHYY, April 26, 2006 · Religion scholar Bart D. Ehrman, who chairs the Department of Religious Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, talks about his new book, Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend.

 

Ehrman looks into the lives of three major followers of Christ, plumbing legend and the writings of the New Testament to illuminate facts and details about these figures.

 

Ehrman is also the author of Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why and Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew which chronicles the period before Christianity as we know it came to be.

 

Pentecostals Mark 100 Years of Worship
 by Greg Allen

All Things Considered, April 26, 2006 · One hundred years ago this month, a small house in Los Angeles was the scene of a series of religious meetings where participants had a new kind of spiritual experience. They had emotional displays, spoke in tongues, and experienced remarkable healing -- all manifestations, they believed, of the power of the Holy Spirit "filling" the participants.

 

Today, Pentecostals claim more than half a billion adherents around the world. It's one of the fastest-growing social movements ever, and one that has had a profound impact on even mainstream religions.

THE LESSON OF TAL AFAR
Is it too late for the Administration to correct its course in Iraq?
by GEORGE PACKER
The New Yorker, Issue of 2006-04-10

The lessons that McMaster and his soldiers applied in Tal Afar were learned during the first two years of an increasingly unpopular war. "When we came to Iraq, we didn't understand the complexity what it meant for a society to live under a brutal dictatorship, with ethnic and sectarian divisions", he said, in his hoarse, energetic voice. "When we first got here, we made a lot of mistakes. We were like a blind man, trying to do the right thing but breaking a lot of things." Later, he said, "You gotta come in with your ears open. You can't come in and start talking. You have to really listen to people."

All of these items made me think for awhile putting aside for a few hours ruminating over my own life history.  If you've not been exposed to any of them, I would suggest that all of them are thought provoking and well worth your time. 

 

My connections here are uniquely personal I'm sure.  What has all this to do with retrospection and mid-life crisis?  Simple, it's summed up in McMaster's words from The New Yorker article with only a change of setting from the war zone of Iraq to the war zone of the mind and its brutal neurotic dictators, ego and doubt.  And, then within that setting a consideration of hope.

 

If courage is acting correctly in the face of fear, if courage is not fearlessness, which is likely some kind of brain damage, but rather the ability to act and act correctly when the most basic emotions tend to paralyze, then perhaps faith is the sense of hope that sustains action in the face of doubt.  If faith is acting correctly in the face of doubt, if faith is not surety, which is also perhaps some kind of brain damage as well, then faith is the ability to sustain hope in the presence of overwhelming doubt. 

 

I would modify one of the pulpit pounder's favorites, "I know that I know that I know", to better reflect my reality, I know that I know that I don't know, that nothing is settled in this life, that only hope is the correct response to doubt.  Hope, an abiding, unfathomable, wordless hope not reason is in the last analysis the only counter weight to doubt, doubt which defies words.  There is likely only one correspondent who has been alerted to this posting that can even begin to see my connections here without further writing on my part.  So we have some work to do, eh?  Should you be that one correspondent with some insight, please, post a comment or write to me directly.

 

May the God of Hope fill you all with all Peace and Joy as you trust in Him so that you might overflow with Hope by the Power of the Holy Spirit!