With that man, that man in the White House, our White House, the White House of, by, and for, the people...  the opposite of a man with any spiritual life...  and this is hard on people, and even in normal political situations much of the spiritual voice gets drowned out.  No?  The dialog is dragged so far in one direction, even to get back to the median, so that you could acknowledge the spiritual element of the created universe, so much static, and that's how he operates.

Like take King, Dr. King, in his last sermon, toward the end of it, talks of going to the Holy Land, and driving with his wife from Jerusalem down to Jericho, and it's a "winding, meandering road... really conducive for ambushing," a dangerous road that drops three thousand feet, and the question for him in his sermon is not about what happens to the person who stops to help out the man beaten by thieves, not about the I, but about the other, as The Good Samaritan in Dr. King's telling is, what will happen to the man if I do not stop to help him...

It's a remarkable speech to come across today.  About how Dr. King's thoughts were not what will happen to me if I do not stop to help out the sanitation workers, but about what will happen to them if he doesn't stop.

And some people, some men, of course, do not stop.


But we too stop, even the writer.  We stop to write of the neglected possibilities, to see ourselves not just in economic terms, but in terms broader.  Why do we exist?  For what?  Who but us will do the work that is God's work, involving God's thoughts...

Trump would not stop, but to toss paper towels to the victim of the mightiest of storm's wrath, in the photo op.  And get away with it, because he has already changed the dialog so far toward the materialist view, that we can barely conceive of an argument for doing better by the victims, as if he'd hypnotized us, numbed us, taken away our tongues...


You're not going to write unless you help yourself to write.  You're not going to write until you write down something small and seemingly inane, and then help out that idea.  You help it gain strength, and add some coherent structure to it.

Hemingway wrote his story, self-reflecting perhaps, about the Old Man and the Sea, a poor man, an old man, a fisherman, a man with a sort of tattered wisdom and very simple means and living.  Hemingway too could side with nature, with the poor, with the lone artist and his struggle, with the spiritual side of things, the deeper realities that makes things so.  He recorded things as they are.  He was one kind of a writer, and perhaps the times, his times, called for that.  His generations had wars to grapple with, to digest.  And in war there is the soldier's experience, and that's a good deal of what he brought to us, the horrible anonymity of destruction, people marching in lines their souls having been forgotten by any worldly authority.


Who thinks he can write when he wakes up...  what have I to write?  For I am a sinful man, even on a good day, or even at best.

But the writer has this vast body of soulful things to remember.  He sees people, potentially, purely, as souls, almost to the point where they become themselves anonymous, messengers of God in accordance with what they do.   The construct of the world bears him up when he gets to concerned with the microcosm of his affairs.

This is light, and it is hard to look at the brightness of the light sometimes.  The kind of impersonal touch that God and the Lord Jesus Christ brings to personal relationships...

If we, oddly, focus on the details of who people are in their individual circumstances--and everyone seems themselves as an independent individual and unique character, seeing worth in tooting their own horns and presenting themselves in terms of individual greatness and power--we lose their potential to come out and act in the spiritual way...

It is not "I" that writes...  And without sounding pretentious, Jesus is accurate and correct when he says it is His Father's business, that the things he is doing come out of the One who sent him.

Each person is a manifestation of the deeper reality, and the deeper stuff can be thought of as something beyond the personal, as it is the spirit which acts, to help, to do good things, to shine the light...

We don't blame Jesus for his impersonal quality, for his distance, his aloneness.   Sure, we don't want to see him as unfriendly and non-smiling...  but it seems it's almost as much the burden of individuality and ego's things that he lifts off people, and they are people weighted by their identity in society...

A sermon is a day's work, a moment of atomic energy translated, transformed into things very hard for us to grasp but made tangible.

The cult of personality, the pagan gods, they exist today too, but one can know better...  And this is why the hermit life isn't so wrong sometimes.  And what do we have to focus on these days, but the surface, the appearance of on-line life, the image...

There are reasons why we've been brought to where we are, and maybe the events and even the reasons behind why where we are where we are are personally sad and trying.  Lessons, such things are.  To know such gives one strength, strength to deal with scary things like uncertainty.  And maybe, perhaps, uncertainty is there for a reason, to teach you something which you have not been able to quite comprehend just yet, a puzzle, something to think over, and ultimately doing a good job of leading you to a better place.