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Wondering Pilgrim

~ the ramblings of a perambulent and often distracted sojourner

Wondering Pilgrim

Monthly Archives: April 2011

Wisdom from the North

30 Saturday Apr 2011

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Personal

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Dag Hammarskjold, Human Rights and Liberties, postaday2011, Refugee

“Freedom from fear” could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights.
Dag Hammarskjold

Another Scandinavian whose aphorisms helped mold my aspirations. Such a simple statement which, if applied to today’s bogey-monsters – asylum seekers, burqua-wearers, anyone who’s different from us – might save us millions of dollars in so-called security measures and angst. More importantly, it would create the kind of community to which I am sure we all, deep down, aspire.

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A 5 year old philosopher…

29 Friday Apr 2011

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Personal

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Comic strip, Dennis the Menace, postaday2011, wisdom

Not long after I came on the scene, the comic strip Dennis the Menace was launched and the song with the same title hit the top 40, mortifying my mother, who then wished she’d named me something else. The TV series followed, along with some memorable aphorisms, such as the one climaxing this exchange between Dennis and his long-suffering next door neighbour.

Dennis: [looking at Mr. Wilson’s gold] Is that Pirate’s Gold?
George Wilson: No.
Dennis: Is it real valuable?
George Wilson: Yes.
Dennis: Is that why you keep it in your safe?
George Wilson: Uh-huh.
Dennis: [looks at Mr. Wilson’s safe with a door of fake books] How come that safe looks like books?
George Wilson: How come you ask so many questions?
Dennis: I’ve only been around for 5 years. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t know.

Soul-mates – him and me! I’ve only been around 61 years and there’s still a lot of stuff I don’t know!

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Experience vs wisdom

28 Thursday Apr 2011

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Personal, Spirituality

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

experience, postaday2011, Søren Kierkegaard, wisdom

Mahatma Ghandi was one of the first great philosophers to influence me. I was all of eight years old at the time. Another that had my adolescent brain ticking over was Søren Kierkegaard. Today’s aphorism comes courtesy of him, and though I don’t recall hearing this way back then, it resonates with a long held comprehension that runs deep:

Experience, it is said, makes a man [sic] wise. That is very silly talk. If there were nothing beyond experience it would simply drive him mad.

(The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard)

Reminds me of the applicant for a responsible position saying he had thirty years experience. Turns out he had only one year’s experience – thirty times over.

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An aphorism a day keeps postaday okay…

27 Wednesday Apr 2011

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Personal

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

aphorisms, postaday2011

… at least while I’m setting up a bank of vacation posts.

So let’s try…

…to accomplish great things, you must not only act but also dream, not only dream but also believe.

I can say okay to this one. It’s reverse is also true – from belief, one dreams and then acts to bring the vision to reality. On the other hand, it’s not enough to stop with the status quo of what has been accomplished. It needs to feed a new vision a new dream, a stretching of belief.

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Acting your age

26 Tuesday Apr 2011

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Personal

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

aging, fitness, postaday2011

A magazine article catches my eye, “Amortality: why acting your age is a thing of the past”. Just click on the link and you can read the whole thing.

Once upon a time, life had a fairly predetermined trajectory – you are born, you work until you grow too frail, then you die. For most of the world, this is still the case. For many of my ilk, however there are a range of lifestyle choices, and sufficient motivation to maintain the range of options open to us for as long as we can. The fitter and healthier we are the longer we can keep these options open.

There seems to be a fine line however, between an obsessive striving to “stay young” and aging gracefully. The time of diminishment inevitably arrives as does our mortality. In my early sixties, I’m fit enough for a range of physical activities, but you won’t find me playing a full footy match or running a marathon. I’ve got a bush walk or two in mind for this week and some house maintenance that will stretch my physicality.

I guess it comes to motivation and the swing between what the spiritual abbas and amas of the desert called “accidie” (a listless, gormless submission to circumstances) and anxiety (a fearful, faithless obsession with keeping the demons at bay). Somewhere in the tension is an alert and relaxed attentiveness that is mental, spiritual and somatic.

If I strive, it is to be in that place.

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Maintaining “Postaday” while on leave

25 Monday Apr 2011

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Personal, Wembley Downs

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Blogging, postaday2011, vacation

My minders may be fuming right now. “We told him he had to take his leave and he’s still writing on his blog!”

Relax, minders! This was written yesterday, as were the rest of the posts that follow this week. I’m using that cool feature in WordPress that embargoes  posts for release at the date and time when I say.

So I’ll take this opportunity to acknowledge my minders who prod me to take time out – you perform a valuable service not only to me and my family but the community of faith here as well. I spoke yesterday of the resurrected Christ being incarnate in the body of the local church. Many is the way this truth finds expression. Looking out for one another is one.

I’m not going to pretend I can write more than five coherent posts in a row, however. So I’ll be back at the end of the week to write another batch. And I’m going to sneak a peek once in a while as well!

Related Articles
  • Postaday no more (gusbinnie.wordpress.com)
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Reflecting on Easter Sunday… a sermon

24 Sunday Apr 2011

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Personal

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Easter, postaday2011, Resurrection

Easter, old greec salut

Image via Wikipedia

“But how did it happen? I don’t understand how when he was dead he was alive again. How did it happen?”

The class had finished. The next class was waiting and I was halfway through the door. A nine year old, engrossed in the drama of the Easter story, required an answer to this question or he would be most disgruntled.

I had at the most ten seconds to reply.

Little did he know that he was asking a question that has proved to be one of the greatest stumbling blocks to a full minded, full hearted, full bodied embrace of faith in the Crucified and Risen One.

The disciples themselves had enough trouble coming to grips with it.

Even though Jesus had spoken many times of his coming death and being” raised on the third day.”…

Even though the concept of resurrection had already been adopted into mainstream post exilic Judaism …

The disciples were just as confused and disoriented on the day of Jesus’ resurrection as we often find ourselves to be. They were looking for answers that required more than a passing ten seconds.

Often we think we have to have it wrapped up so neatly.

Christian tradition has spent two thousand years developing and narrating through art and music the Great Triduum  – the events leading up to and including Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday.

Good Friday services – with their focus on the vicarious pain and suffering of Jesus seem to draw the most crowds. Our own human experiences seem to be so well expressed in the shame, scapegoating, grief, disappointment and seeming failure of the Passion of Jesus.  We are drawn, not through masochism, but an eternal value that breaks through the most awful things we can humanly experience.

It is the demonstration of love – it is the culmination of a truth that Jesus demonstrated and taught throughout his time amongst us “Greater love has no one than they lay down their life for their friends.”

We can feel part of the Good Friday story – it is our story that beckons us to be more complete expressions of who we are called to be, even though it culminates in death.

Holy Saturday seems to be a hiatus – an “in between time”. The gospel narratives graciously omit the thoughts and activities of Jesus’ followers at this time. Grief deserves a season of silence – where nothing is said and nothing is done.

Easter Sunday immediately throws us into the unexpected. Grief and trauma experts would say it’s far too soon to come to grips with new realities – we are still trying to assimilate and adjust to fresh loss.

Yet here it is. On the third Day the Son of Man will be raised.

The women attending the tomb at dawn with their embalming supplies must replan their day and their emotions.

The disciples must contend with their disbelief and confusion.

And I suspect this morning that many of us may find ourselves among them.

This week we have farewelled two significant fellow travellers, both well known to our community of faith, both an integral part to our understanding of who we are.

At the service for Keith and again at the service for Bruce,  we uttered the words that give expression to resurrection hope, yet this morning on resurrection day, we are still dealing with our feelings of numbness and empathy for their families who are in the early stages of readjustment to “the great absence.”

Others of us, for ourselves or our friends, have received grim news about our health and once again we are confronted with finiteness and mortality.

There were those of you who, at our Good Friday service, came face to face in a deeper way with some of the grief that you have carried daily with great courage and faith.

But this morning, Easter Day, the Day of Resurrection, you are brought face to face with a new reality.

Traditionally, the Great Triduum marks this day as one of joy and celebration.  We may feel under pressure, in spite of ourselves, to put on a brave face and join in with gusto the alleluias and the Easter shout.

I know that we often do these in defiance of our feelings than because of them.

Our question is not “How did it happen?” but what does the resurrection of Jesus, the Christ, God’s anointed one really mean? What does it mean to the grief I carry for myself and others?

This question moves us beyond the debate of the mechanics of resurrection and the debate around its physical, metaphorical and allegorical interpretations. The question, “What does it mean?” transcends them all.

Bruce Sanguin, who blogs at If Darwin Prayed, also reflects on the meaning of resurrection in the face of personal loss:

Paul had this theology that Christ was alive in the gathered community, risen in them, or not at all. I’ve never felt that the church took itself seriously enough as the mystical body of the risen Christ.  Church is a community that knows all about despair and so is able to create a space that can hold the grief. Like Jesus, we can be a healing presence…

When the time is right, we can also play the part of the mysterious stranger in the story of the road to Emmaus. The road to Emmaus is the path we all walk when we discover that much of life is beyond our control. The conversation can turn to despair, but the stranger miraculously sets this conversation within a larger narrative of promise. Then he sits the heart-broken disciples down, feeds them, and explains that the worst thing that can happen is never the last thing that happens.

Beatrice Bruteau , in The Easter Mysteries, reflects on resurrection thus:

It’s about “anointing” the world to be the real presence of God. This is what is celebrated in the Easter vigil and Eucharistic Feast. What we call “resurrection” is the full manifestation of the Incarnation itself. This is the revelation of what and who we really are…

…Thus the divine life comes down from heaven and is sown in a perishable body. But the divine life gradually rises up as the imperishable that it truly is. The world itself is to be wrapped in the mantle of divine praise, the presence of the life-giving Spirit. And this takes place through us, the highly conscious elements of the world, the humanity made from “humus,” from the dust of the earth, the dust of the stars, and organized into a “living being,” which is ultimately to realize itself as the “life-giving Spirit.” The first humanity was from the earth, a humanity of dust; the second humanity is from heaven….Just as we have borne the image of the humanity of dust, we shall also bear the image of the humanity of heaven. (1Cor.15:47,49)

If that wine is too rich and heavy, try this. Rebecca Lyman writes:

In his black and white photographs, [Ansel] Adams portrayed the whole range of tones from deepest black to pure white. Black and white are not oppositions as much as ends of a continuous range of light. His development technique overcame the limitations of the photographic paper to reproduce more closely the ratio of the human eye: we see much more than what a camera could reproduce. In his photographs of Yosemite snow and granite, Adams revealed to us what we physically see. Our minds and eyes are no longer disconnected. In Adams’ photographs we see light spread throughout the zones of black and into white again.

On Easter the resurrection stories of Jesus connect our eyes and hearts to our minds as Gethsemane becomes Eden. We have spent a week soaked in pain, separation, betrayal, and fatal suffering. What our hearts sought, our eyes did not find in the awful torture and death of Christ. None of this was what should have happened to a good man in Jerusalem. The male disciples flee and the women disciples stay, but all see nothing but the relentless victory of death.

Now in the early morning, the women encounter grief and joy as the darkness of the tomb gives way to light as dazzling as snow and lightning. The places that we knew were empty of hope are filled with divine presence, and the world as a whole has been remade new. We go to the garden looking only to be near our lost beloved, and find ourselves embraced by Love itself.

[At the Easter Vigil before dawn, we pray] This is the night … when Israel came out of Egypt, when all who believe in Christ are delivered, when Christ broke open the bonds of death. This is the most holy and blessed darkness where restoration and healing come from “Christ, the Morning Star who knows no setting—he who gives his light to all creation.”[1]

These places in ourselves that we avoid are exactly where God makes a home. What we consider to be tombs of our buried hope and dreams become the gardens of God’s renewal. The sharp realities of suffering, death, and grief are essential to the continuum of love and joy at Easter; their very darkness is what causes the light of resurrection to dazzle.

We don’t have to come to grips with it all at the mouth of the empty tomb on Easter morning. On the calendar, Easter is a season that runs, not just over this long weekend, but fifty days. Indeed, every Sunday is a reorientation to resurrection affirmations.

We ponder at leisure the fresh realities that the empty tomb of Easter places before us. And, like the women and the Twelve who were amongst the first, as Jesus’ intimates, to reflect on the new reality that confronted them, we  too can move from confusion and despair to a courageous embrace of resurrection faith and drive.

So how does one satisfactorily answer a nine year old’s question about resurrection in 10 seconds?

“But how did it happen? I don’t understand how when he was dead he was alive again. How did it happen?”

“I don’t really know how. God did it!”

His look of relief and wonder was transparent.

“Oh, God did it!  Wow!”

I also breathed a sigh of relief. That was all he wanted to know for now. And it’s a starting point.

Christ is Risen! Alleluia! Wow!

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Reflecting on Holy Saturday…

23 Saturday Apr 2011

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Spirituality

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Easter, Holy Saturday, Holy Week, postaday2011

Their waiting was different from ours. We wait in anticipation of resurrection celebration.

They waited in despair for the Sabbath to pass so they could tend a cadaver and complete a proper entombment.

Our waiting is for the completion of a cycle in a story that continues.

Their story had been destroyed – pilloried on a shameful instrument of execution reserved for the worst rebels against institutional authority.

Our hope is in the invitation to participate in the drama of a life fully lived, courageous in death, transformed in resurrection purpose.

Their hope was yet to be revived – but they had to wait…

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Reflecting on Good Friday

22 Friday Apr 2011

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Spirituality

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Good Friday, Holy Week, postaday2011

“Why is it called Good when such a bad thing happened?”

There’s a bit more to this question than just the etymology that says “good” comes from “God” and that some say it was originally “God’s Friday.” It’s helpful to just sit and ponder the question a while.

Let such stillness take you past the rubrics of theological niceties, past the head stuff about Hebrew sacrificial systems and philosophical nit-picking. Descend into the heart of things, and if possible, the gut. Let the question sit viscerally.

The answer may not come, but you will know at a deeper level what Good Friday is about. And the question will feel different. Then read the story of the Passion in one of the gospels again.

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Reflecting on Maundy Thursday…

21 Thursday Apr 2011

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Spirituality

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Foot washing, Last Supper, Maundy Thursday, postaday2011

Christ washing the feet of the Apostles, by Gi...

Image via Wikipedia

When I was a schoolboy somewhere back in the last millennium, there were class monitor jobs that were much sought after – cleaning the blackboard, feeding the gold fish, collecting the lunch orders. The one no-one enjoyed was emptying the rubbish. Things haven’t changed that much – I asked the school kids the other day which monitor jobs were popular and which were the least enjoyable. Some tasks have changed in this high tech era (there is an energy monitor), but someone still has to put out the rubbish! The students agreed however, that the least enjoyable jobs were important. Someone had to do them.

I guess foot-washing was on the list of least desired tasks amongst Jesus’ contemporaries. It was the task of the least influential person in the household to wash the dust and animal dung from the feet of weary travellers as they reclined at table.  When Jesus gave one final demonstration to show how the economy of the Kingdom worked by washing his disciple’s feet in preparation for the last meal they were to share, the disciples were somewhat disconsolate. Not that he was calling them to serve, but that Jesus, their teacher and mentor, the honoured one, was performing this lowly task on them!

The foot-washing became an entry point for much that Jesus had to share over that meal – the total giving of himself – reinforced in bread and wine that his disciples would eventually come to understand as a way of recognising when Jesus would continue to be amongst them – in serving one another and in table fellowship.

Some of the lousy jobs ascend to the highest order!

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