St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church

What does our furniture say about us?

I've got a garage full of furniture that my brother and I inherited after my parents deceased. In the rectory is furniture that has been donated or loaned to me over the last ten years. It doesn't all match, but after a while it becomes more familiar. Perhaps my furniture says I have different sorts of s(h)elves.

Or that I'm just too lazy to throw any of it away.

I've always found the word "holy" to be a little strange.

I usually hear it describe other nouns. Like when someone says "Holy cow" or "holy moly" or "super holy mother of all crazy freak moster trucks...."

Or maybe when it refers to my coat pocket and the reason I keep losing pens.

.... So the unfolding of the universe - biotic, and perhaps abiotic too - appears to be partially beyond natural law. In its place is a ceaseless creativity, with no supernatural creator. If, as a result of this creativity, we cannot know what will happen, then reason, the Enlightenment's highest human virtue, is an insufficient guide to living our lives. We must use reason, emotion, intuition, all that our evolution has brought us. But that means understanding our full humanity: we need Einstein and Shakespeare in the same room.

"“All I can suggest to the mystic and the theologian is that our gods have been too small; they fill the universe. And to the scientist all I can say is that the gods do exist; they are the eternal, connected, and aware Self experienced by all intelligent beings.'"...

Read it all

I find this a much more orthodox (and correct) understanding of God-consciousness than the Anthropomorphic, Calvinist understanding that pervades what passes for contemporary Christian thought.

Three is a magic number,
Yes it is, it's a magic number.
Somewhere in the ancient, mystic trinity
You get three as a magic number.

The past and the present and the future.
Faith and Hope and Charity,
The heart and the brain and the body
Give you three as a magic number.

It takes three legs to make a tri-pod
Or to make a table stand.
It takes three wheels to make a ve-hicle
Called a tricycle.

Every triangle has three corners,
Every triangle has three sides,
No more, no less.
You don't have to guess.
When it's three you can see
It's a magic number.

Over the last two weeks, two events have happened that are worth examining through the religious, or spiritual, lens. what I mean is that people are doing things that are irrational - they have little utility in themselves. They are responses to a feeling of being face to face with the transcendent, the infinite, or God.

We should change the way how we train our clergy. Here is one suggestion.

The priesthood would be a five year training program that is conducted locally in the home diocese, on-line with seminarians and professors nationally (and internationally), with yearly coursework at established seminaries.

Olivia Judson describes cooperative relationships between species in nature. It seems cosmic to me - in fact, I think that symbiotic friendship she describes represents how the divine works in nature. She writes:

Recently someone asked me about Gnosticism and Buddhism. I offered this quick response.

Gnosticism is a general term like "humanism" or "mysticism." Many different religions have had gnostic sensibilities - a radical dualism, a suspicion of the body, an interest in secret knowledge. The church rejected gnosticism for several reasons. Gnosticism is anti materialistic and devolved into tight-knit, secretive communities.

The bishops wrote a letter, and it was very nice. There were some promises that were appropriate, simple and clear.

I want to make a couple observations about rhetoric that I've been hearing. I have a more detailed analysis about the entire conflict that I'm slowly working on, but I want to parse a couple phrases.