"When you begin to think outside the box, you often become some other "leaders" lousy follower. That usually costs something" (Andy Rayner)

"Our guardian angels are bored." (Mike Foster)

It's where I feel I'm at these days. “In the second half of life, it is good just to be a part of the general dance. We do not have to stand out, make defining moves, or be better than anyone else on the dance floor. Life is more participatory than assertive, and there is no need for strong or further self-definition” (Falling Upward. Richard Rohr.120).

Sunday, September 30, 2018

The Bible Is Historically Accurate- Or Not - And Is Again

"The critics once insisted, for example, on the nonexistence of ancient Hittites in the Fertile Crescent, of camels in Egypt in Abraham’s time, of writing in Moses’ time, and of Sargon and Belshazzar in much later centuries. Now all learned men are aware that the Hittite empire rivaled the Babylonian and Egyptian, and even the Hittite language has been recovered; moreover, camels and writing have both been restored to ancient Egypt, and Sargon and Belshazzar are no longer dismissed as imaginary. Many other “historical impossibilities” once detailed to discredit the accuracy of the Bible and to caricature any notion of its total reliability have emerged to render ludicrous some gifted critics whose remarkable learning was dwarfed by a prejudice against scriptural reliability. Today the documentary theories of Wellhausen are no longer assigned mantic authority, and what was historically impossible to many biblical critics a few generations ago is frankly conceded by more critical historians to be now convincingly attested."


Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 4 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 174.

Thursday, September 27, 2018

Delusional Brilliant Marxists

"There are a lot of delusional, brilliant Marxists in the world."
- George Gilder



Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Life Lessons From Momma

LESSONS FROM MUMMA

"When it came to listening 

My mother taught me silence. 'If you are drowning their voice with yours

How will you hear them?'

She asked. 

• • •

"When it came to speaking 

She said,

'Do it with commitment

Every word you say is your own responsibility'   • • • 

"When it came to being 

She said,

'Be tender and tough at once.

You need to be vulnerable to live fully 

But tough enough to survive it all.' 

• • • 

"When it came to choosing 

She asked me to be thankful 

For the choices I had 

That she never had the privilege 

Of making."

- Rupi Kaur. "Lessons From Mumma" 


Tuesday, September 25, 2018

I Have Destroyed The World

Forgive me.

"..... but how do you atone when you have destroyed the world?

- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey On Two Rivers 

Sighting Down A Gun

"...... if a man could sight down the barrel of a gun and pull the trigger, there was no hope for the world."

- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure 

Begging For A Chicken

Having worked internationally for many years i can't begin to say how true such dynamics really are. What is a seemly simple task to us, calls upon every resource a poor man to woman has to prove something to us before we act. 

"I made contract with the town's children that I would give them gringo chickens to taise if they would first build little bamboo chicken houses for them. It turned out that the kids and their fathers were too poor to buy nails or bamboo, too poor to own hammers and saws. Still, the little boys were crazy to own chickens. How they pestered and begged."
- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure. 

Sunday, September 23, 2018

How Is Your Now?

"So much of religion involves teaching people this and that, and accumulation of facts and imperative that is somehow supposed to add up to Salvation. The great teachers know that one major change is needed: how we do the moment.

- Richard Rohr. The Naked Now 

Enough For One Day

"You can find such some things by asking yourself (as if you generally want to know) three questions: "What is it that is bothering me?"  "Is that something I could fix?" and "Would I actually be willing to fix it?" If you find that the answer is "no", to any or all of these questions, then look elsewhere. Aim lower. Search until you find something that bothers you, that you could fix, that you would fix, and then fix it. That might be enough for the day."

- Jordan Peterson. 12 Rules For Life 

A Better Life For You and Me

" You realize that it's a mistake to aim for a better life, if it comes at the cost of worsening someone else's. So, you get creative. You decide to play a more difficult game. You decide that you want a better life, in a manner that will also make the life of your family better. Or the life of your family, and your friends. Or the life of your family, and your friends, and the strangers who surround them. What about your enemies? Do you want to include them, too? You bloody well don't know how to manage that. But you've read some history. You know how Amity compounds. So, you start to wish even your enemies well, at least in principle, although you are by no means yet a master such sentiments."

- Jordan Peterson: 12 Rules For Life 

Mountains Are The Revolutionaries Friend

"Many of the world's most entrenched conflicts take place in mountains, and we neglect this fact at our peril. Far from being irrelevant, these remote, often archaic, and seemingly exotic exceptional communities are enormously important to the future safety and stability of the world at large. The mountain is friend to those who want to elude or destroy authority - the revolutionary, the poppy grower, the Jihadi, to name only a few. Mountains are the last place where roads are built and the first place people go to hide."

- Judith Matloff. No Friends But The Mountains.

Friday, September 21, 2018

Too Mouthy For Silence?

I appreciate his words very much. We are too mouthy at times. Not enough stillness or silence. Yet, proclamation, stelling the story, sharing His wonders and deeds is core to our faith as well. 

I know what most will  say about the need to use our mind. Loo at his cautions below about exalting the mind. The transformed mind is not always the mind that is actually at work. 

It is not either or. Rather, it is both. 

"Presence is experienced in a participative way, outside the mind. The mind by nature is intent on judging, controlling, and analyzing instead of seeing, tasting, and loving. This is exactly why it cannot be present or live in the naked now. The Mind wants a job and loves to process things. The key to stopping this game is, quite simply, peace, silence, or stillness. I would even say that on the practical level, silence and God will be experienced simultaneously- and even as the same thing. And afterward, you will want to remain even more silent. The overly verbal religion of the last 500 years does not seem to understand this at all and tends to be afraid of any silence whatsoever. It cannot follow Jesus and go into the desert for forty days, where there is nothing to say, to prove, to think, or to defend. 
Although we all use the phrase peace of mind, there is really no such thing. When you are in your mind, you are never truly at peace, and when you are truly at peace, you are never in your mind........

Yes, the mind is necessary, but it can't do everything. 
Yes, the mind is receptive, but reason is not out only antenna. We also need our bodies, Our emotions, our hearts, our nose, our ears, our eyes, our taste, and our souls. 
Yes, the mind can achieve great things, but through Over Control, it can also limit what we can know. 
Yes, the mind can think great thoughts, and also bad and limiting ones. The mind can be a gift and a curse. 
Yes, the mind can tell left from right, but it cannot perceive invisible things such as love, eternity, fear, wholeness, mystery, or the Divine. 
Yes, the mind can discern consistency, logic, and fairness, but it seldom puts these into practice. 
Yes the mind and reason are necessary, but they must learn to distinguish between what lies Beyond its reach; the prerational and the transrational.
Yes, the mind is brilliant, but the more we observe it, the more we see it is also obsessive and repetitive. 
Yes, the Mind seeks the truth, but it can also create lies. 
Yes, the mind can connect us with others, but it can also keep us apart. 
Yes, the mind is very useful, but when it does not recognize its own finite Viewpoint, it is also useless. 
Yes, the mind can serve the world, but in fact it largely serves itself. 
Yes, the mind can make necessary distinctions, but it also divides in thought what is on divided in nature and in the concrete. 
Yes, the mind is needed, but we also need other ways of knowing or we will not know well, fully, or freely. 
Yes, the mind is good at thinking. But so much so that most humans, like the card, thing they are they're thinking. 
Yes, the Mind likes to think, but until it learns to listen to others, to the body, the heart, and all the senses, it also uses itself to block everything it does not like to do or to acknowledge. 
Yes, the mind is our friend, but when we are obsessive or compulsive, it can also be our most dangerous foe. 
Yes, the mine welcomes education, but it also needs to be on educated, to learn how much of what it "knows" is actually near conditioning and Prejudice.
As a result, the great religions of the world found methods to compartmentalize, but not eliminate, the over control of the thinking, rational mind, through practices such as prayer, meditation, or contemplation this was the "new mind," which allowed 

  • 1. other parts of us to see 
  • 2. other things to be seen, 
  • 3. the rational mind to then be reintegrated, but now as a servant instead of the master.
- Richard Rohr. The Naked Now 

Love & Willingness Are Better

"In my own Franciscan philosophical tradition both St. Bonaventure and John Duns Scotus top that love or willingness were higher than mere knowledge."
-Richard Rohr. The Naked Now 

God Is Breaking Into Every Age & Culture

"St Francis told us Friars that if we found a page of the Quran, we should kiss it and place it on the altar. His Christian truth was not fear-base. He could honor God and Holiness anywhere it was found, and not just inside his own symbol system. 
If there is indeed one God of all the Earth, then it is this one God who is breaking through in every age and culture, and monotheists should be the first to recognize that truth is one (Ephesians 4:4-6) and that God is "all in all" (1Corinthians 15:28. Yet they usually end up fearing and even opposing these ideas, probably because in their own lives their religion has been tribal more than transformative. Perhaps we want to belong to something exclusive, the equivalent of a religious community club, but by that time, of course, our God has become very small and been whittled down to our size."
- Richard Rohr. The Naked Now 

Enjoying the 10% Truth?

"In all situations, of course, the all-important question is: "Is it true?" Not: "Is it from my group?" "Does it please me?" "Does it displease me?" "Does it use my vocabulary and my definitions?" Not even "Is it 100 percent true?" Who cares? The saint would say. "Only the ego cares," the Buddhist would say; and the ego is not interested in truth or in God, only in control. If it is even 10% true, the saint is grateful and happy for that gift.

St. Thomas Aquinas said in the thirteenth century: If it is true, then it is from the Holy Spirit."

- Richard Rohr. The Naked Now. 


Ego Loss

"The ego seems to strengthen itself by constriction, by being against, or by re-action, and it feels loss or fear when it opens up."

- Richard Rohr. The Naked Now.

Monday, September 10, 2018

Power Corrupts Us All

"The passion for gain was their universal passion. After all,  in the absence of any checking up, such power was inevitably used for personal enrichment. Ine would have to be 'holy' to refrain."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. 

Bored With Torture!

" It's really pretty monotonous to keep doing the same thing all the time. Those trembling hands, those imploring eyes, that cowardly submissiveness-they are really a bore. If you could just get one of them to resist! "I love strong opponents! It's such fun to break their backs! said the Leningrad interrogator Shitov to G.G _____v.""
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. 


Thursday, September 6, 2018

What A Jungle Can Support

"How does one make farms on unproductive earth, on lateritic soil, which, being stirred and work one time too many, will violently revolt against this rape and set up like cement so that overnight it becomes like rock into which a nail cannot be driven? The ecology of the Amazon jungle, fifty times more subtle and complicated than the intricate balancing of a Calder mobile, operated for centuries when each human who inhabited it had ten square miles to roam in and to harvest from; this was what the jungle could support. The land is poor and leached from the incessant rains, so poor in fact that almost its entire richness has gone into the trees that stand up on it. It was the unproductive nature of the Jungle that determine the essential nature of the people who once owned it; they were small tribes not much more than family size, and they were Nomads who claimed enormous territories." 

- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey On Two Rivers 

Tuesday, September 4, 2018

To Be Seen

"Out of the desperation of loneliness how we will clown and whore to see ourselves reflected in another's eyes."
- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey On Two Rivers "

Pediree Of Ideas

Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas.

—Lord Acton

Protected Travel Isolation

"What confounds them and turns the trip into a kind of dream so ephemeral and fading that it cannot be discussed is the identical nature of the hotels where they have stayed; the hotel in Manaus is an exact replica of the hotel in Miami, in Belém, Fortaleza, São Luís, and Teresina. My God, where are we now? What's the date? And of course they are protected. They will be protected by the cement hotels with the roof-top restaurants, the wall-to-wall carpeting, the arctic chill of the air conditioning from whatever is real in South America; their reality is the gift shop in the hotel lobby that sells postcards of sunsets never seen, The Identical airports, and that almost identical ride by taxi between airport and hotel. In almost every city in the world this strip of Highway will be the best in the country and fringed and divided with statues, fountains, trees, and historical plaques - the whole project design to detour away from the most authentic element of the worlds malaise, the stench, the menace, the overwhelming symbol of a collapsing economic system - the urban slums. If these old folks have read someplace that 50% of Brazil's Workforce earns less than $50 a month, they will find it impossible to believe in there fifty-dollar-a-day hotel room to which, isolated from the squalor, they have been carefully steered."

- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey On Two Rivers. 

Calmness For Evil

"I love the people and their innocent sweetness, their calmness before blatant evil."

- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey On Two Rivers.

Sunday, September 2, 2018

What Forgiveness Can't Be

"Forgiveness can never be indifference."
- George MacDonald