Hopewit

. . . a really nice place “The presence of God is infinte, everywhere, always, and forever. You cannot not be in the presence of God. There’s no other place to be. It is we who are not present to Presence. We’ll make any excuse to be somewhere else than right here. Right here, right now never seems enough. It actually is, but it is we who are not aware enough yet.” (Richard Rohr, https://cac.org/category/daily-meditations/ ) I’d be the first to admit that the contemplative life—including the language that contemplatives use—escapes me most of the time. “Contemplative prayer,” “emptying oneself,” “living in the here and now,” “God as presence,” these phrases mostly leave me feeling inadequate. I think of monks and gurus and orders like the Franciscans of Richard Rohr and wonder what I’m missing . . . and then wonder if it’s they that are missing something substantial that my Anabaptist heritage bequeathed to me. Radical Reformation Anabaptism and Evangelicalism...

WARNING: This post may contain misinformation, repetition of lies that were mistakenly believed by the writer, and assertions that reflect the writer’s biases. It may also leave out what should be said because prejudices of the writer have inserted themselves. It’s that kind of a world. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. - John Keats (Ode on a Grecian Urn ) Psalm 52:2-4 (NIV) You who practice deceit, your tongue plots destruction; it is like a sharpened razor. You love evil rather than good, falsehood rather than speaking the truth. You love every harmful word, you deceitful tongue! Does it begin when we’re children, defending ourselves with disinformation about someone else? Do we set out early on the road of equating falsehood with truth if doing so benefits us? And if we assert vehemently that “Joey broke the window,” and our mother says, “I believe you, honey” and gives us a hug, ...

Let's revise our constitution, YAWN It matters little how small or large your institution, organization, church, club or family is, fixing your constitution and bylaws —beginning with your mission statement—seems to represent the first task to which we will ever have to set our collective minds. The mission statement outlines the reasons for which all of the following bits and pieces exist, for the “because we want to be this, and accomplish this and that, we will do our politics this way . . . for now.” The value in composing mission statements, goals and bylaws is not in the text they eventually produce, it’s in the exercise of getting there. The evidence for that lies in the degree to which the resulting text is referred to or ignored as time goes by. In many organizations, the constitution and handbook have been hauled out and altered occasionally—piecemeal and haphazardly, generally—but most members are hard-pressed to know where the true, revised copy exist...

Creation's attention to detail #1 Paul lifts a prayer for the church at Ephesus: “. . . that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him; the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, and what [are] the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints . . ..” (Ephesians 1:17-18, KJV) Parsing the central thought here, Paul expresses the hope that God—in sending Jesus—has extended to them the “spirit of wisdom and revelation” so that they are in reach of the knowledge of what Christ’s coming means. The “spirit of wisdom and revelation” having “ enlightened the eyes of their understanding ,” Paul prays that they will recognize what a great hope lies in store for them. Maybe because I was born with one good eye and one “lodged with me useless,”  in Milton’s words—and am now living with cataracts and threatening glaucoma—that the ...