Infinite Dishwashers

I came home from holiday yesterday to find that my dishwasher had sprung a leak and had flooded our kitchen for days.  I am a creature that dislikes to be inconveniently surprised by home maintenance.  I believe that before the Fall all hoses stayed in tack, all motors ran for infinity, all electricity and electronics never failed.  Electricity, in its natural form, never fails.  That copper and bushings create energy is a universal truth and that fluids are contained is fact.  What is flawed is I.  When I try to harness all these universals I find my efforts always defective with finiteness.  When we consider this truth about ourselves we must immediately call into question all that we are involved in including our theories about how the universe came into being.  That a Single Loving God did it all is just as plausible as time plus chance except that the idea of a Single Loving God is so perfect how could we, finite flawed dishwasher makers, conjure up such a Devine Idea?  If we are capable of thinking up the idea of God we certainly could create an infinite dishwasher.

Quarks and Why Do You Pray

I was reading C.S. Lewis this morning and he posed the question to himself, “Why Pray?”  I posed the same question to myself.  I pray in hopes of redeeming even a small part of my relationship to God, to hopefully allow us to become better acquainted and therefore better friends.  I pray to acknowledge that God is God and there is no other and that I am desperately in need of Him and just as desperately, it is my wish, to want Him.  I want God’s attention.  I want to bother God to the point that He will bother with my issues and me.  I want to secure God’s continued good favor to and toward me and mine.  I want God to know that I know that I cannot worship Him in any manner worthy of Him but that as the human He made me, I want to try anyway. 

And then there are things that I do not understand.  I want to pray to acknowledge that God is God, all that He reveals Himself to be so that humans can fathom Him, and that in that fact I am compelled often, and desire to more often than that, to worship Him because He alone is WORTHY.

I pray always because what is the alternative?

I pray because I believe.  My belief is often so infinitesimal that it is almost undetectable by me but I believe, since God made quarks, that He can detect my belief, what ever its weak signal. 

Blood and Blood, Sweat and Tears

Finished Exodus and began Leviticus and the blood begins to flow.  I do not mind blood.  Seen a lot of it in my day, animals, others and mine, a lot of mine, pint after pint wasted…

But Leviticus blood is different, it is not just blood, it is atonement blood, blood that’s given from one on account of another.  It flows but not in gore, in anticipation of the eventual final bloodletting, the letting of Blood Glory over me.

This blood flow reminded me of one of my favorite bands of my youth, Blood, Sweat and Tears, and one of their songs that is suitable this morning…”You Make Me So Very Happy”

Blood Glory can do that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quVpo96O3ZU

the band Blood, Sweat and Tears

Christ, Kilns And How I Make My Living

There is something definite in us that takes sensory information and turns it into something that we have come to acknowledge as miraculous.  There is no real explanation for it and evolution, when thought of while having the experience, seems itself to be silly superstition akin to voodoo around the boiling pot.  Take for instance the cosmic jingling of ecstasy when we smell a long forgotten fragrance like the Old Spice that our grandfather wore.  Something immediately leaps upon our existence, clutches our hearts and squeezes out a remarkable cup of joy.  We have no rhyme for it but it is certainly a drink we could call Nectar of The God.

 

On evidence of Christ

“There is now added the consciousness of a Living Fact which includes, transcends, completes all that you mean by the categories of personality and of life.  Those ineffective, half-conscious attempts toward free action, clear apprehension, true union, which we dignify by the names of will, thought, and love are now seen matched by an Absolute Will, Thought, Love; instantly recognized by the contemplating spirit as the highest reality it has yet known…None who have had [this experience] have ever been able to doubt its validity.  It has always become for them the central fact, by which all other realities must be test and graduated.  [By God the mystics (or authentic Christian)] mean, not a notion, however august; but an experienced Fact so vivid, that against it the so-called facts of daily life look shadowy and insecure.

Evelyn Underhill

Becoming Oldly New

Having considered “becoming old” I have discovered there is something about becoming new in the act of becoming old.  I don’t mean I am becoming younger but I am being made new.  I am becoming more aware of what it means to be alive and growing much more grateful for the moments of life that I have been given.  All that is outside of my being seems to be profoundly more meaningful as I grow more aged.  It seems that I have begun to more fully realize rain, sunshine, love and all the small things that make up the sincerity of creation.  It produces gratefulness in me and that seems to nourish a continuation of the joyful awareness of the consciousness of existence.  It is like I am becoming more and the more is best described as giftedly new. 

Another way to look at this is as a youth I was most concerned with how I looked and as an old person I am most enamored by how the world looks around me.  Not only its physical characteristics but its spiritual, psychological, philosophical and emotional nature as well.  All things seem to grow meaningful as I grow older and that is a newness that is very different than being young.  It does, in a very great sense, create something of youthfulness to my being.  This may be a small key to the making of art.  Artists may be born more sensitive to the beauty that is around them, or more able to sense the profoundness of existence in all forms.  So in some mysterious way as I grow older I am growing newer and this newness must culminate in something because I am so aware of its power that if I were to live for say, several hundred years, I would be unable to contain the knowing of it in the current body I now inhabit.  I will truly have to have eternity or something akin to it in order for me to be fully realized in this evolving newness.