Category: Mystagogy
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The Time Toggle
\[[Alienation and the feeling of time]] Work over a drawing or a poem and all sense of passing time is suspended. The next day, watch television all evening, and you’re surprised at how fast the evening goes. These are common observations, common enough that we can state the principle: when the senses are…
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There is a Child
There is a Child There is a child who walks in the treetops at daybreak and at dusk. He prefers the company of birds to that of men, so few men have seen him, though some have heard him chortle as he slides down the back side of the sky on his way home, beyond…
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Do Better People See More?
Do good people perceive anything at all that evil people do not? Anything? Once this line is crossed, we must allow for the existence of persons, castles, dragons, and unicorns that the good can see and the bad cannot. If there is any moral dimension at all to percipience, and if we allow that everyone is…
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Conversation is Simple.
Are we just complicating something simple? When we first talked, it was “I’ll say something, you say something back.” Exactly. This is all we do, I agree. Inside the moment this is all we experience. To adapt something from C.S. Lewis, looking through the crack in the door we don’t see the sunbeam. The light…
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Conversation: No Conceding
You cannot be wrong, you cannot let me be wrong, yet you cannot concede or allow me to concede. When my friend speaks, his words become my thoughts. Concession is acknowledgment of the friend’s words but without truly internalizing them. It is a false assent. It is a failure of rigor. If I concede my…
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Conversation: Experienced High, Barely Remembered.
I see that look. What is this pretension, this business of “conversation as high art”? Don’t people converse all day long, you’re thinking? No. Most people pass their lives and never hear a Conversation. They cannot imagine what they’ve never heard. I’m not interested in a phenomenology of general human conversation. Nor am I interested…
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Notes on Zen. Like A Crow Collects Pebbles.
I collect here my thoughts on what is called “zen” by western people, like me, and in keeping with the genre of zen writings, in no order. One comment is not necessarily connected to the next, just like your thoughts arise from darkness, speak, then settle back and are gone. ******************************************************************************** Much of the popularity…
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Jesus
You are the missing person in my life. Even the days when I am ashamed of my forgetfulness You are the ghost in my memory. I feel a hole shaped like You but I can’t be sure if I made it or if You made me this way. My life’s yearning is to hear…
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Faith: Hold the ground you have won.
I can’t endorse Mormonism, but this is good stuff, from a talk given by Elder Jeffrey R Holland at the LDS Conference in April 2013:http://www.lds.org/general-conference/print/2013/04/lord-i-believe?lang=eng In moments of fear or doubt or troubling times, hold the ground you have already won, even if that ground is limited… When those moments come and issues surface, the…
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Forms, Interrupted: How Worship Happens
Liturgies are born as spontaneous formalities. They can be recorded later, but not then re-enacted. Each moment in the presence of God is a formal dance whose rules have been forgotten. Did you actually think that the moment before St. John saw an uncountable crowd around the Throne that some angelic ushers directed all to…