Hopewit

Boquete Flower Festival, Panama A man reaps what he sows. Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.   (Galatians 6: 7 & 8, NIV) If you’re like me, Paul’s ubiquitous reference to Christian life as a war between flesh and spirit can be a puzzler. Flesh , to me, has always had connotations of meat; like a raw tenderloin of pork or a carcass of beef hanging in a butcher’s cooler. Or in the human body, flesh wound as opposed to a broken bone. Muscle, in other words, comes to mind.  The Greek word Paul was using, s àrks, can denote flesh but also connotes the person before Christian regeneration. The person as physically born. In effect, then, Paul would be saying in verse 7, “If you persist in thinking and living like you did before you heard and accepted the good news, you are sowing daily the seeds of your own disappointment.”  Parsing spiri...

Jill Mitchell Art, https://www.facebook.com/pg/jillmitchelloriginalart/posts/ This is what the Sovereign Lord , the Holy One of Israel, says: “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it. (Isaiah 30:15, NIV) It's nearly 9:00 o'clock on a winter Wednesday morning . I've just read Father Richard Rohr's column on “Inner Silence,” the contemplative life that makes space for renewal and maintenance of the spirit. “Inner Silence,” I conclude, is the opposite—roughly—of thinking. Thinking/doing is mind-busyness while resting in inner silence is a gift to the mind as sleep is a gift to the body. (Rohr would probably recoil at this analogy.) I'm obviously not in a contemplative state right now, at least not of the kind Rohr describes. I couldn't be writing these words if I was because this task takes thinking. And obviously, Rohr was not in that state either when he typed out his des...

Catedral de la Asunción de María Santísima -Guadalajara, Mexico Eigenheim Mennonite Church, Rosthern I'm currently leading an adult study group in a series of four lessons from I Kings concerning the building of Solomon's Temple. We're being reminded about the symbolism that's present in structures Jews and Christians have built over the centuries. Only some archaeological bits of Solomon's temple remian in existence, and no cathedral construction comparable to St. Peter's in Rome, St. Paul's in London or St. Isaac's in St. Petersburg is currently being contemplated, at least not to my knowledge. (An exception might be the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, which remains unfinished although begun in 1882.) How we construct worship sites says a great deal about the nature of our beliefs regarding whatever higher being we imagine. In the case of the temple of Solomon and the subsequent temple destroyed by the Romans, location was apparently ...