Hopewit

Never repeat a conversation, and you will lose nothing at all.With friend or foe do not report it, and unless it would be a sin for you, do not disclose it;for some one has heard you and watched you, and when the time comes he will hate you. (Sirach 19:7-9) If you wouldn't nail it to the post office door, don't put it on Facebook! The social media have at least this in common: they allow both text and photos to be posted to “friends,” or to the world, while their distribution to “friends of friends” through “sharing” makes it possible that thousands of “not friends” may see it.  Second, posts are like fish hooks; once inserted, they can't just be pulled back without leaving something behind. Their contents can be stolen, stored, re-purposed in unintended ways by persons with sinister or foolish agendas. Many persons in the political sphere have been haunted, even destroyed by the unanticipated resurrection of posts from distant pasts. Cut...

Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth . ( 2 Timothy 2:15, KJV) And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh . ( Ecclesiastes 12:12, KJV) There's a woman in Pennsylvania who has made it her mission to locate social media postings that are set up to propagate false news, postings that spread dissension, that are often spread mechanically and in massive volumes by what's called a bot . Russian sources of such false messaging posing as news is a current story in the USA, of course.      Some in church circles have maintained that Christians have no business participating in media where so much vitriol, untruth and half-truth is mixed in with what is genuinely posted as news, that they will be caught up in the emotional controversies that lies and deceptions are meant to foster.   ...

Our local funeral home posts notices of deaths and memorial services in the post office. This morning a new notice appeared of a 25 year-old man and as I and a woman I didn't know read the notice, she said: “He was far too young.” I agreed, “He certainly was.” Far too young. An aunt died recently at age 101; she'd wished for years that she could "cross the bar" but surmised that her pilot had forgotten about her, and so failed to call her home. Alfred Lord Tennyson's image of life fading into the great unknown includes a harbour, a boat, an ocean and crossing the harbour-bar to put out into the great sea. How we see the significance of the short span of life that is our lot probably makes an enormous difference to how we choose to occupy our days: our thoughts, our dreams, our activities. The psychology of perception very nearly suggests that the universe exists only in human consciousness; that for you and me and every other individual, i...

You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands. (Isaiah 55:12, NIV) Isaiah 55:12 has been set to music and children in my church sing it in Sunday School worship . . . a lot. In the final refrain, they clap for the trees; I doubt that many consider the prophet's intent in Isaiah 55's sustained metaphor, or recognize that it comes close to being a remarkable encapsulation of what faith in—and faithfulness to—YHWH meant to Jewish teachers and prophets in Old Testament times. As an English language student and teacher, I wrestled with educational methodology in the“teaching” of poetry. Is there a valid educational point in presenting a work of art . . . when its meaning and intent has to be “explained?” Should art—whether visual, musical or literary—not impact us on its own, or is the appreciation for artistic expression something we learn as m...

Shekinah Timber Lodge Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God. (John 3:20-21, NIV) Light and dark make powerful metaphors for all kinds of human experience. The prophets and the gospels are full of their illustrative power. The passage from John must have come to mind to many who watched and sought to understand the meaning of the Ford/Kavanaugh hearing on Thursday.  As an attempt to bring Ford's accusation and Kavanaugh's defence into the light, the process failed, the only clue to where light and dark might lie rested in the demeanour of the two witnesses. Judging the veracity of Ford's accusation and Kavanaugh's defence came down to groping in the darkness of bias, prejudices and personal interest.  People perpetrating crimes—includi...

The Vanishing Point A pastor in the Southern USA started her own church because, as a Lesbian, she had begun to feel that whatever her graces, however strong her faith, her acceptance in her Protestant congregation would always hinge around her sexual orientation. I heard an interview with her as I drove home from a meeting in Langham, and I'm still pondering an intriguing point she made. Our sacred texts—The Bible, The Quoran—should never have had back covers put on them, meaning that if these texts are inspired by God—as she believes—does it follow that their contents were all God had to say? “I'm not represented in scriptures,” she said, “and there are any number of life situations people face that simply didn't exist or were ignored when the scriptures were declared complete.” She has a point; how often have we debated moral issues by extrapolating from scriptures what we think they would say if written in our time? We call it discernment , but that ex...

The Molecularity of Thought Granted, we need words to communicate our thoughts. And the history of English Literature has proven to me that the words of our language can do amazingly at communicating ideas, images, even sensory impressions. Take even a snippet from Bernice Friesen's The Book of Beasts: “. . . when Paddy walked to school with him, walked him into the Mother Superior's office, had her dial his father's number and they both left him alone with his father's voice, all he could do was cry, cry for his father to take him home. His father's promises to do just that, his father's sobs blurred into his own shaking relief.” Where would we be without words? Grunting and pointing, I imagine. But confusion, chaos and deceit are also sown with words. There's much more to our communication than can be unlocked with a dictionary or thesaurus; words are the tools of humans, and humans are complex beings, often unpredictable, often manipulatin...