| ... | Wed 19th falls on the Jewish Fast of 10th Tevet. The Wikipedian oracle reads: |
| "The text in II Kings (25:1-4) tells us that on the 10th day of the 10th month, in the ninth year of his reign, (588 BCE), Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king, began the siege of Jerusalem. Three years later, on the 17th of Tammuz, he broke through the city walls. The siege ended with the destruction of the Temple three weeks later, on the 9th of Av, the end of the first Kingdoms and the exile of the Jewish people to Babylon." |
We've been under siege for a year now. I'd love to get around this lasting two more years if possible. The sun still shines as brightly or the rain falls in its time. Still the walls get broken through and exiles begin, or not. I'd love to come home to my vocation in a place that values building community and working well with conflict. I feel in exile. So I write and write and write and write and
What else?
I believe in the danger and ubiquity of creeds.
Here is mine.
This is what passes for philosophy in my life.
Purpose is in the unfolding process of imagining a better way of being and then projecting it faithfully.
Reality is in the ongoing process of living ways of imagining through projection.
Suffering is in the continuous process of slowly realizing ways of being imagined through life.
Joy is in and on purpose, or it isn't. (start again)
At the level of identity I am Under Six Feet and Tall Enough to Reach the Records. On the other hand I am Big but not quite big Enough.
Under six-feet and "six feet under" are related...................(click on "Life's Too Short " if you are not Lisa)
Tall Enough is a prophecy. Big Enough isn't.
I'll say more of what I mean by this later, if there is a later, on my wiki.
I might put more here soon.
Labels: Aidan, daily, grief, philosophy
| posted by Unknown @ 12/11/2007 03:00:00 PM
didn't feel right to responding to this on the blog comments
there is no consolation for losing a beloved.
every day i ask myself why was it him and not me.
i am not any ones light.
i am not any ones future.
why is life so cruel?
I,
If you are in a space in which your questions are rhetorical then PLEASE disregard my responses.
There are few things more unwelcome than Philosophy tromping through the midst of the body's grief.
At the moment these questions are not rhetorical for me. Thus, the following responses.
Maybe we hold a bit of each others' light and future? Certainly, you hold a bit of mine.
My dreams will not come anywhere near true without the people I love because they are at least in part defined by them. I dream of family, community, and guardianship of peace. Each of these will be real at the point that other people in my sphere of influence are participating and profoundly getting what they need. Then we may point and say that we have achieved some measure of success. When I notice that I am holding some "light" (with so many meanings) for someone (including myself) I certainly feel called to take the parts of others' light I hold more seriously.
As for the future, if all we can imagine as important can end without further comment at any time then the choices we make are probably irrelevant and essential at the same time. Irrelevance allows a certain freedom of movement. The samurai keeps his own death ever before him in order to be able to move freely into and out of battle - neither of which Matters. Both are simply necessary and can reveal beauty and give weight and context to life. This is the essential part. My life needs context and depth (or meaning, if you prefer). This is unlikely to have consequences for or in relation to Life but is damned important to me.
If I'm serious about withdrawing my projections of Justice (and all other Big Ideas) as divine or universal but simply native to the human scope, then who am I to imagine that Life is cruel? Cruelty requires disposition, attention toward suffering inflicted by something a human could recognize as consciousness. Also it requires a governing standard against which behavior may be compared and found wanting. If there is any consciousness (as we understand the term) attached to our abstractions, gods like God and Life, then to imagine that Life would intend anything toward me is outright hubris. People write plays, or used to (unless you are Sondheim or Mamet), about such things.
In short, His Eye is not on the sparrow. My eye is on the sparrow. And the sparrow may end up as a very minor part of my lunch, or as a reminder of the beauty and brevity of existence, or as anything else my ravenously transformative metaphor-making consciousness needs at the moment. This may seem cruel to me but there is no court of Cosmic standards to which I may make an appeal, compare myself to the sparrow, and reach a desirable resolution of Brandon v Life.
If working conclusions are required:
- All the more reason to work toward compassion here so justice becomes more frequent and basic and peace becomes more likely and widespread.
- specifically not because a God would have it so, but because I want it and you want it, and because God may be declared dead when life appears cruel and all bets are suddenly off.
- You and I are much harder to get rid of.
- Or not.
- Depending on how you look at it.
Labels: budo, cruelty, death, God, gods, life, philosophy
| posted by Unknown @ 12/30/2006 02:17:00 PM
Huston Smith and I have been working together for some time. He has nominated me to the Pacific Coast Theological Society and asked that I send you a brief email with a bit about my background, work, and desire to participate in that group.
I am in the process of finishing my dissertation, working with the cultural terrain described and created when the languages of mythology and psychology intersect. As a student of David L. Miller, Christine Downing, Daniel C. Noel, and others identifying as "post-Jungian," reading and interacting with Thomas Moore, Sam Keen, and Huston Smith, and receiving advisory assistance from Dennis Slattery and William Doty, I have embarked on a phenomenological survey of traditional, contemporary, and emergent ideologies beneath living social structures and the theologies they imply. What emerges from this inquiry by association is a growing art of process, wherein how culture is created moves downstage of the industrial fascination with what it is possible to manufacture and distribute. Divinity often arrives in this equation in the guise of conflict itself, calling for a martial insistence on doing conflict well rather than defining peace in terms of its absence. Redefining peace in this way demands a new kind of purposeful community building which centralizes specific choice, co-creativity and governance, begins with social justice, and rediscovers the nourishing and terrifying mystery shrouding images of God wherever they may be found.
Since childhood I have been a professional vocalist and liturgist in the Christian church. As an adult I have participated fully and refrained from participating in both the United Methodist and Roman Catholic communities, and continue to visit and share in the ritual life of various faiths and local sects of various spiritual bodies, including the Karuk sweat tradition. Beginning my education immersed in the Montessori Method, I went on to a Jesuit College Prep high school and the University of Dallas for an intensive Liberal Arts Bachelors degree with emphasis in philosophy, theology, and history, a major in theater, and a semester of study in Rome. My graduate humanities degrees involve cultural study and criticism and are granted by Pacifica Graduate Institute as "Mythological Studies with an emphasis in Depth Psychology." Predominantly in the United States I teach and develop various Process Arts, a method called Associative Inquiry, a Japanese martial art called Aikido, and the non-profit Association Building Community and their Guardians of Peace project.
My first exposure to PCTS was finding and making reference to Claude Welch's writing on H. Richard Niebuhr, "The Making of an American Mind? and Andrew P. Porter "The Fertility of Niebuhr's Idea of Monotheism". I am grateful to Huston Smith for nominating me and hope to join in the conversation where it stands (or reclines, as the case may be) and look forward to many fruitful exchanges.
(866) 236-0346
P.S. please let me know you received this and if there is anything I may help you with in the near future
Labels: academy, bdwc, collegiality, membership, philosophy, theology
| posted by Unknown @ 11/06/2006 03:51:00 PM
