I love fall and spring. Winter and summer, I can do without, especially summer. I look out my window at a slate-grey, drizzly sky. Here we are on the cusp of winter, a time when for almost a thousand years, the Romans celebrated their festival of Saturnalia from 17-23 December. In a kind of Roman mythological-cultural memory, Saturn ruled during a time of bounty when everyone could eat from the land and no one had to work. I wonder if this golden age idea might be related to earlier, Jewish, Garden of Eden accounts.
Wee Bookies
No, we are not talking about diminutive odds makers. These are short little books of the Church of England Eucharist as it was celebrated in Scotland by “nonjuring” Anglicans in the 17th and 18th century. Key portions of the Scottish “Wee Bookies” were included in the American Book of Common Prayer. How this happened is part of our heritage.
Monasticism
A friend told me the other day that he was so isolated, he might as well join the monastery. So, perhaps we should take a moment to reflect on what is often called the “religious movement” or monasticism.
Hopeful and Funny
These items were gleaned from a recent Sierra Club magazine. I offer them to you to help brighten your day and to show how real changes in policies, practices and priorities are often driven by business decisions more than politics.
Harmony
Following our recent, raucous national election and similar developments worldwide, I decided to look at the issue of harmony and how it is handled under Confucian, Asian cultures versus mostly Christian, western cultures. As a caveat here, this is a Cliff-notes kind of gloss and generalization of two very complex and distinct cultures. With that in mind, we may learn something in comparing the two.
I am Thankful for…
- Life, in all its varied mysteries and forms. That each of us has a time to live.
- Beauty, in the natural world that touches all our senses. In human relationships. In art and music. And in mathematics.
- Reconciliation, because it enables new lives to go forward. Read more…
Richard Hooker (d 3 Nov 1600) and the Three-Legged Stool
Every good Episcopal or Church of England seminarian is required, sooner or later, to read Richard Hooker’s five-volume series, “Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polite” (completed 1597). The prose is turgid, dense, and academic. The tomes pose a critique of the raging Puritanism at the time. His sermons and teachings offered reasoned, heavily informed reason against the Puritans with their doctrines of predestination and exclusionary notions of salvation. (Note that some of these controversies are still with us today.)
A Timeless Question
I started writing this morning about 5:30 with a tribute to sixteenth century English theologian, Richard Hooker. As I studied the puritans and the treatment of them by succeeding generations of American historians, I came upon an observation by John Winthrop after sailing on the Arabella to the New World. This was the voyage where he is said to have written his now-famous “City on a Hill” sermon (although he was not an ordained minister, it was a “lay sermon”).
The Last Ice Age
There are a variety of truly natural oscillations in our planet’s orbital journey that lead to periodic variations in global weather or climate Change. We can observe these true “natural variations” in different geological records. In fact, this year and for the near future, we should be experiencing a downward cooling trend in temperatures instead of the relentless upward trends caused by anthropogenic warming. Let’s take a look at global conditions during the last “Glacial Maximum” period which lasted from 23,000 years ago to 19,000 years ago. Yes, these natural variations last a long time compared to the span of a human lifetime, but from a geological perspective, such cycles and eras are the blink of an eye.
God as a Programmer
There is a Greek philosophical argument (for which I cannot find a reference) that one cannot prove that reality for human observers was created in this current instant. In that scenario, all our memories and all of history is nothing but information that a clever creator planted in our brains. Nothing existed prior to THIS instant, click. Of course, René Descartes in 1637 posited, “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am) and one would think this ended all forms of ontological speculation. It didn’t.