On Quarter Time

 

Ocean currents flow both on the surface and below. Wind currents sweep above lands and waters, from sky to low. Everything is in flow, through time. All that you loved is in flow; what you did and said, loved and held, flowing back and forth, around and over and under and through.

Is the cosmos full of fire, and the earth of water? Is time regular, or full of floods and pools? Is God both mathematician and musician? Evidently. Common time in music is quarter time; four fours, a quarter note one four. The seasons divide into quarters. So a quarter of a century is a big chunk of time; it’s a real bite. From 2000 to 2025 looks like a quarter from here. Now someone will tell me my maths is most suspect, but history is cyclical, of this I’m sure. The forces of purity and fear retreat, and then return, when you don’t expect them, when your attention is directed elsewhere. From Christ’s time to our time, we entered the third millennium: it’s called the Common Era, but I prefer the old term Anno Domini. You can’t hope to see it all, but you can hope to see.

 

On Love and Charity

 Love one another. Is this enough? Love your enemies, too. The theological virtue of Love is a path, loving others through love of God as the strength of love for God makes all loves possible. Then again, your enemies are trying to destroy you. What would happen if enemies love each other? Peace on earth? Embrace an enemy today?

Be good to them that despise you: to say you’ll pray just makes them angry. Love is an action. Preach the liberation of the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind. Free the oppressed.

Love saves. Mainly it saves you. The desperate love of parent for child; the passionate love of the Song of Songs: love is hardly love without emotion. Charity, however, may seem unloving love, cold as charity a proverb. Who is my neighbour? Share dignity with charity: receive the same.  Let charity be shown to you. God knows the need.

Love saved the weeping woman at Christ’s feet. “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven: for she loved much.” Or with Tyndall: “To whom lesse is forgiven, the same doeth lesse love.” Who is my family? More love, more family. You are one of all of Us.

On Faith

 

In my understanding, a mystery is something that changes a person in relation to the Divine. The mystery of Christian faith is conveyed through Baptism and is lived through every day. Faith in its ordinary meaning encompasses loyalty and trust, so you may have faith in a football team that lets you down, but remain loyal. Trust is what you have. Loyalty is what you do.

Faith is the theological virtue that enables us to believe in God and believe in Truth as revealed in Jesus’ words and Word. That’s what makes Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” so interesting. Is Pilate a Nazi Gauleiter jesting with his Jewish victim? Is this a Stoic rhetorical question from his schooldays? Pilate is a man of action. He orders crucifixions, many. He lacks faith, but finds no harm in Jesus. Why?

Faith isn’t intellectual assent to a set of propositions. Nor is it blind, or unthinking. Faith is a Trinity surrounding you with love and support. Believing is related to loving: you may love what you trust, and trust what you love, and see miracles. In the words of Tyndall’s 1526 translation of Luke, “Thy fayth hath made the safe.” Go in peace.

On Envy

Envy consumes the eye. It is tainted sight. Invidia means looking closely, too closely at the advantages of others. Wealth, beauty, achievements, relationships, opportunities. It gives birth to resentment, hostility, and hatred. While jealousy defends one’s own possessions, envy desires another’s. It dwells in a limited world; it feels there is never enough; a world of reaching for prizes, seeking for names. Aquinas calls envy “sorrow for another’s good.”

 Envy distorts judgement. Where justice returns to everything that which belongs to it, envy seeks to take it away; envy will suffer loss, so others may lose. The evil eye is envy personified, withering crops, sickening children, fuelled by a sense of grievance and inferiority. Envy is the seat of many crimes, from theft to murder. 

Integrity is seamless. Wholeness protects. “If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” That eye is the road to the heart: kindly, beneficent, generous, benevolent, loving. Light enables us to see reality as it is; darkness obscures. “If thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.” We know so little about others, even judging God: “Are you envious because I am generous?” God’s eye is true. 

On Greed

 

Avarice. The casino guy washing himself in fountains of coins splashing out of machines; the oligarch plotting the offshore travels of rivers of state funds through money laundering channels to private island accounts: greed is godless. Amos the prophet on the case of the fashionista with the $15,000 handbag; the Temple treasury taking the widow’s last mite. The Scriptures are pitiless about greed. Zaccheus must restore fourfold all he’s extorted.

Greed destroys the earth. Deep sea mining. Deforestation. Animal extinctions. So much beauty. In heaven as it is on earth: colonising even the moon.

Benefactors as well as malefactors. How was the money acquired? Is there a tax deduction? The good old Biblical term “the poor” has fallen out of favour: can it be you, or me? Or not? Be careful here. Paul advises balance. (“According to your means”). Not too little, not too much.  Check yourself at the door. Give eagerly, but wisely.

Hoarding specifically demonstrates greed. Cornering limited resources for personal benefit, national glory, ethnic dominance. Letting others suffer and starve.

Tax can be good. And greed can be bad. At the end of your life, “Whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?”

On Sloth

 

Sloth is a creature known for its sleepiness. If your metabolism, like my greyhound or your sloth, makes you nap 20 hours per day, are you still slow for the 4 hours you spend awoke? The sloth is slow no matter what time of day. The greyhound is exceeding fast.

The slow sloth got its name, meaning ‘laziness’ in 1749, named for one of the seven deadly sins, called in Latin acedia. Lacking energy (or care) to read your Scriptures, pray your prayers, or care your cares, is what Pope Francis calls a ‘dangerous temptation’ to find ‘disgust’ in everything you do. How does this differ from clinical depression? Possibly in the four hours you can choose to use. The signs of the times are showing how each conscious being must seek the way to mend the world. The simplest may be the most effective. Gospel means news: it was hard enough to know who’s telling the truth in Pilate’s day. Is it not slothful not to check? Look around. Is silence false witness? Silence is no witness. Is no witness false witness? Is fantasy, entertainment, conspiracy theories, propaganda? Be fast chasing what God loves: justice, mercy, humility and truth.

On Gluttony

 

Lent, and a sugarless season. How much could we wish to eat? Places under siege suffer starvation, while who even knows whether prisoners and captives are fed? In times of dire unrelenting conflicts, abundance is unreachably far. Is scarcity, not gluttony, the sin? The concept of gluttony is based upon glut: filled to excess, not only more than you need but more than you can contain.

 A man walked into St Peter’s Bookroom where I worked; he said not to bother the priests, but perhaps as someone from the church I could answer a question about prayer. Is God frustrated or angry at so many pleas? I said was a parent angry when the toddler kept pouring out questions: “Why?” “Are we there yet?” God knows our limited understandings, our big emotions. God knows about us. We Christians, I said, know two things about God. God is good; God is love. Is not love patient, or kind? I said Jesus taught the way of prayer: “Do you know it? ‘Give us this day…’”  “Our daily bread,” he replied. “Keep it simple,” I offered. Pray as you must. Daily bread is daily. Not too little; not too much.