Long meandering prose or 3 way overlay

Today I am bereft of enough physical energy to finish the Rose Picture, and will be glued to the settee and laptop, until this present bug flies away, and so, ad hoc, in the manner of tidying the house, I have, again, ad hoc, opened my little red notebook, [one of many little notebooks] and have come upon a page with the heading, 'Remembrance Sunday'. … Half way down the page, I find 2 biblical references: - Amos: 5: 18-24 and Matt.: 25: 1-13.

  Earlier this morning I wrote several comments on Stephen Law's FB page, relating to Dawkins' somewhat negative comments about the Old Testament God. Chief Rabbi Jonathon Sacks had accused Dawkins of being anti-semitic.  Part of one of my comments went thus:

 Dawkins, 'by criticising the God of the Old Testament',  ... 'can be seen to be, speaking against all religious Jews, as this harsh, strong and betimes even brutal' ...  'God, is their God for all time'.  ... 'The lessons of our so-called O.T. are engraved upon the souls and hearts and minds of all religious Jews'. ... in  'Keep and remember':-

'Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy'.

— Exodus 20:8-11 (ESV)'

The Old Testament, as we know it, has been adroitly put together, so that old and new can be seen together: as can theory, practice, warfare, romantic love: all that is inner and all that is outer: idealistic pursuits, huge errors of judgement, .. all that is gross and grandiose of what it is to be human.

Above we see an injunction to keep the Sabbath holy. Much has been written about the meaning of the word 'holy'. 

Stories have reached my ears, of Orthodox Jews sitting on filled hot-water bottles, riding in their Volvos on the way to synagogue for it is written that one should travel to synagogue by water.

And then we have Amos, who was writing, so we are given to believe, in 750BC. The Exodus occurred, we do not know when, but many centuries prior to the following tirade.

Amos 5:18-24

18 Alas for you who desire the day of the Lord!
   Why do you want the day of the Lord?
It is darkness, not light;
19   as if someone fled from a lion,
   and was met by a bear;
or went into the house and rested a hand against the wall,
   and was bitten by a snake.
20 Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light,
   and gloom with no brightness in it?

21 I hate, I despise your festivals,
   and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
22 Even though you offer me your burnt-offerings and grain-offerings,
   I will not accept them;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
   I will not look upon.
23 Take away from me the noise of your songs;
   I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
24 But let justice roll down like waters,
   and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

 And so Amos rants, just as Juvenal rants, in a somewhat different society, 900 years later. Erstwhile, somewhere in the middle time-wise,  Diogenes of Sinope, walks around, lamp in hand, looking for an honest man.  

The first is called Prophet, the second is called Philosopher and the third is called Ranter or Father of Satire. All three are pretty annoyed at the ways of men.  

 [By 'men', above,  I mean humankind.  I just think that defining it spoils the poetry of the words, but feel obliged to add this, given the politics of  our day.]

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

And so, as Hegel tells us, we have patterns upon patterns, reforming, recurring, co-inhabiting our epistemological spheres, going towards, or at least, going forwards, we may think and hope.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

I return to my little red notebook to the page with the heading, 'Remembrance Sunday', where I find the above Amos quotation listed alongside one from Matt.: 25: 1-13

Matthew 25:1-13

25“Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. 2Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. 3When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; 4but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. 5As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. 6But at midnight there was a shout, ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ 7Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. 8The foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ 9But the wise replied, ‘No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.’ 10And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. 11Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ 12But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’ 13Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.

And so we are advised here to be vigilant in all things and at all times.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Underneath the heading in the little red notebook I read,

 'Poppy contains both new hope and grief'
 and a
 'Reminder of that gift we have in the midst of suffering and death'.

I think these notes are from when I attended church.

Lower down at the bottom of the page I see:-

'Themes for Advent:
Remembering the past
Living in the present
Planning the future'

and

'Advent planning for Jesus' coming again ...
sombre, serious procedure'

and

'Preparing to be prepared'.

and

'Jane Williams, [this must be a Rev.] 'comments on text of bridegroom.'

And, whilst reading her words in my notes I recall an earlier posting on this Honi soit blog.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."
— Henry David Thoreau, 'Walden', 'Where I Lived, and What I Lived For' 

....................................................................................................................

And for what are we preparing?  J. Williams
What was Thoreau really searching?
Why were Amos and Juvenal angry?

....................................................................................................................

What is this invisible to the human eye ... mystery thing which pulls us and drags at us, as to a seedling searching the Light of Day? 
And why does it hurt so much if we do not search?

The Crux

This morning I have been thinking about the importance of the Church, if only to give us something to react against, for, if we are sent to Church at an early age, our mind is opened up to concepts, which otherwise might have evaded us for the whole of our lives.

 Should the gap between the teachings of the Church and our childhood's perception of the world be more like a gulf, then surely a challenge might be to form a bridge between our personal perceptions and this totally different take or perspective on existence.

Incongruities abound.

As a child, my first layer of incongruities consisted of those in my natal village. These were, going from east to west: -
School, The Ivy Tree, Church, Manor House, Pub, the Telephone box, the Village Shop and Post Office, the Village Hall, the Bridge, my house, an old and dilapidated chapel and then, a mile outside the village, The Woods.  Outside this 'known' childhood map, which was indeed a 'me' map, extended an unknown, which went north, south, east and west, into the towns and cities, other lands and seas, alien and strange, to my childhood-village-me-map.

The second layer of my perceived world of 'beyonds' and incongruities was vertical, from the soil I stood upon, upwards as far as my eyes and imagination could see.  This last perception merged with ideas about God.

Is it, then, the human state, that mind and body should travel in different directions?



...

The Child

The child was always longing to escape.

Many thoughts later

I've looked and looked for answers,
and the more I look, the more questions, more questions, do I find.

Oh, yes, and oh, yes!
Parallels and more, and yet more, do I
draw,

Yet, no answers, no answers, do I
find.

And, so, and, so,
I shall draw.

'Even scientific studies seem to suggest that there is a correlation between excessive self-cherishing and damage to one's physical well-being.'
[pp. 81-82, 'The Dalai Lama's Book of Transformation', Thorsons 2000]


'Commit thy works unto the LORD, and thy thoughts shall be established.'
Prov. 16:3, King James Version


'We must maintain a delicate balance; trusting God as if everything depended on him, while working as if everything depended on us.'
footnote to Prov. 16:3, p. 1101, Life Application Bible, King James Version

On Gender

He sang in silence,
Eternal
She was the Silence,
Everlasting.

Author's own

If we want the Truth, was the first word a mistake?

'One of the strongest Buddhist convictions is that it is not possible to express in words what is most real, sublime and ultimate. For this reason even the finest, most lucid and consistent doctrine can only be regarded as provisional and as obscuring the ultimate truth rather than revealing it.'
[p. 81, 'Buddha: [foreword by the Dalai Lama] William MacQuitty, 1969, Thomas Nelson and Son Ltd.]