Inconstancies, Incoherencies & Other Sad Dreams

I posted the previous musings - the very New Year of it - in spite of having held them two days - as has this one been held a day or two now - held, studied, chewed over (even though each posted by the date originally drafted). A particular strain ran through the first that did not quite accomplish what several hours more would have provided. Okay, might have provided.

Might indeed not have provided, in which case said post would have joined others that dawdle in draft mode, eternally waiting.

But sometimes it is as much the desire to see these words transformed into the colours of passeres as anything that moves me to hit that button, publishing to be read.

After all, draft mode is plain black letters on unassuming white. How much more restrained might I be if only I could see the draft in the colours of my blog and then discard it - or hold until it were more suitably retiring!

For the present post, yesterday, exhaustion finally took over. Enough emotion! Pensiveness, be gone! I saved the draft that one last time & signed out of passeres. Wandered away to my warm bed and TV's lame offerings for the night. I would eat yoghurt (I make my own now) and a slice of banana bread (see below) for supper & count it sufficient. I'd frozen the pot of bean soup finally, earlier in the day. It remained the possibility - but somewhere in the midst of all I popped corn.

Whole grain, after all...but I have segued now into the yesterday that, in real time, is the day before the 'today' which is actually yesterday's post...which is to say, as I addend it the following day, confusing.

Let me begin again, without the additions of this later 'today' - and return to the post as originally summoned...

I am sitting here, the day that is usually vanquished by chores & shopping, sans both. My marvelous kitty is in my lap - purring, no less - I am wishing I had a cup of hot cocoa. I even have whipped topping. But not enough milk, and what little I have is made from powder. I ran out at breakfast, and was serving a quick brunch of oatmeal (the five-minute kind), boiled egg, a slice of banana bran bread (homemade - I adapted the recipe from several to get the bran in) and a glass of juice (he chose orange; I had vegetable) to a friend who has made a habit of helping with said chores & shopping each week.

I served it on bamboo trays, as my apartment is small & does not have room for a table or chairs. I had lost all but one to broken bamboo then found a cache at a thrift store at the precise time I was looking for them.

Sometimes my thrift store visits are like that. Rather eerie, to find exactly what I'm looking for, when it had not been there before the exact week I needed it.

If you try to buy them new these days, you really shouldn't. Neither the workmanship nor the material is worth your investment. A disappointing matter, when I went out shopping for one. Finding the cache was quite pleasant, and not purchasing the entire batch showed great restraint.

Great restraint is a new thing.

Problem is, I always wish I hadn't shown it. Remember things I passed up forever.

But here I sit, intent on writing a post, since it is too late now to pull the one I put up yesterday: folk have read it. I am rather pensively remembering the afternoon, when I decided to go on & post, instead of spending the rest of the day in edit mode, as I normally would.

I'd decided to accept an invitation I'd spent the several days since it'd been proffered pretending I'd decide the day in question...

Knowing I'd already decided. And, indeed, following through on my necessity, had finally refused. But would I ever after wish I'd accepted? Could I accept, given the nature of knowing things finally had ended...

Just laugh & fall into the delight he always brings me, even in the sadness of things that can never be more than they are - a moment here, a moment there...

How much pretending all is glee can a life take? I have been a mere pup, wagging my tail & loving no matter how casually he views me - no matter how many times he forgets to walk me. I wait by the door, leash in mouth.

Always hopeful. A dog never faults his master, you see.

A dog loves forever.

He'd proffered lunch & 'an afternoon doing whatever I wanted.'

Such largesse has never been mine before. And to have offered several days before: he is purely a last-minute petitioner - who knows if something else will turn up that is more fun than what he planned with me - or what mood he'll be in if he's made plans in advance & gets in a funk...

Better to wait & see.

But as a dear friend quotes often, every camel has its straw...

And that one curiousity of camels - they never know how close they've been - or as that same friend also said (was it a poem?), "Some people never know an ending when they see one."

Posts are usually best done in the early hours, which left the day long ago. So why write now. Some things there are the universe can't be told - the personal nature of this new thing called 'blog' (which a private journal does not forfeit, even if it later is published) is too close (i.e., that thing claustrophobics run from) for reverie...that dividing line between 'personal' and 'created' and 'okay because it's universal & sometimes somebody out there just might need to hear' is all too skewered these days.

I'm listening to the soundtrack from The Constant Gardener. Took an hour to finally coax a rambunctious Miss 'Ti (her shortened name, with title) to curl up in my lap - she will do so when I'm watching TV but this is quite a first for sitting here at my computer. And to purr, too!

She is not much for purring. Cat, music, sunlight just barely remaining - it is almost four. Very cold in Atlanta today. So why am I writing.

And what sad dreams...

I've been dreaming (for any who might 'follow' authentic in-the-night sorts, and their dreamers) (and yes, a whole lot of folk do: almost a science pulled up around it now) a lot again about small creatures. Couple nights back, an orange cat - for whom my dream did the unforgivable: it named the poor creature, "Patty-cats."

The indignity of it all! But the dream was easy to translate - my dreams rarely tell me secrets. And rather than weight the universe with the full tale, suffice to say that for a few moments, I began to cross a dangerously bad neighborhood in the middle of the dream-night, and as I set out, abruptly, all was black. Pitch-black.

I could see nothing.

Never had that in a dream before. Or perhaps, for just that moment, once before.

It is very telling, to be sure. Any dream analyst would start at such a dreaming.

But Patty-cats - a truly joyful creature, bounding more than running along - and I got through safely & came to this dilapidated park with a small pathway circling something - perhaps a fountain or small pool; I can't really remember.

Blue sky & sunlight. I walked the path, kept calling Patty-cats not to run away. You know dream time. Mere moments - the telling always is longer than the dream - and the small white stone pathway became small boulders, set now above any hope of flat pathway. They rose sharply for perhaps four feet, maybe five - all the stones were broken.

And at the top of the small rising, a broken wall.

But a wall. Path ended there. I turned back. Walked back around the small path, still calling Patty-cats to keep up. We returned to the previous segment of the dream - back, quickly, through the bad neighborhood.

Minus the pitch-black night.

Last night, I dreamed about a tiny baby. Dressed her in pink - a small outfit that belonged to my own wee girl almost thirty years ago now. I was going to put her in shoes, too, but I noted she'd already grown too big for the pair the dream gave me.

I gave her to someone to watch for me for a moment & she put her down in the floor. The wee thing crawled over to the door and before anyone saw, the baby had pulled herself across some planks with rows and rows of exposed nails. I remember seeing her lying there on top of them, crumpled.

It was frightening, and sad.

Fauré's Requiem plays now. Pie Jesu. I stopped in the middle of all to make hot cocoa after all & it was as bitter as only made from scratch can allow. I know dreams. And I know what it means when small creatures, and babies and wee things are the stuff of them.

They are often representative of the dreamer's heart.

And I know why.

But my dreams do not proffer answers - nor futures, though once, a fortune teller imperfectly did. Still waiting her telling to come true - and not so sure now that the one true thing of my life is really...

So very true at all.

That inconstancy that interrupts the minutes - yes, no - stop, go - stay or move on...sitting there yesterday, that long & impersonal conversation - a conversation any could have. The history of Christianity, as I recollect.

Usually a favourite of mine.

And it was cold, and I noted the cold more than the conversation. And noted my reacting to things he said. Searching for The Answer, always. And one minute it was yes, and three minutes after, no - I knew it was no. How could it be anything but no...

And then yes again. And then he was leaving - and that one chaste embrace - and then, okay, two. The first got interrupted by something he saw sitting on my table.

But they were most chaste. I would not allow more. Funny, how a hug can involve all of the embracers - or just...

Umm.

Half.

Perhaps one should not tell secrets to the universe. Even on a quiet and pensive afternoon...

[Editor's notes. Line quoted from 'Always Did Like a Cheap, Tinseled Thing.' ©1975 Isobel Freer.

For any interested in the other CDs I listened to through this afternoon, they included the soundtrack listed above, La Belle France and Bella Tuscany, two in a series of classical meanderings on the Telarc label.

In reading back through the post of concern in the opening paragraphs of this proffering, I find that distance allows a better read. Whether that pulls from the excessively 'personalized' view of a woman - after all, that place of acute me-ness is both gift & curse in being female - or merely from the distance a writer needs sometime to forget all the thoughts that crowded into a piece as it is brought into proper order - is not something I can definitively say.

However, I find today that the only image that really might have left a reader hanging is that of the soap bubble. So I addend as follows: it is the nature of a soap bubble to pop. The weight of the air will finally overpower.

But when - and how - and where - and why - and sometimes even who...

Those are not predetermined. Nor are we. The intricacies that create our choices - our free will - are more than we know - and when those [additional choices] of the folk whose choices made affect our choosing - some of whom we never meet nor dream - it is not so much a 'random' universe as the common understanding of the word allows.

And that one last moment, waiting until a new decision is made, from which a great many actions and reactions and reactions again will spiral out...but certain grave realities are as set upon us (they are our nature) as the battle of the soap bubble and mere air.

Yet God watches, and waits...]

Musings the Morning After Another Discussion with a Friend

...The Jewish constraints of what Christ did – and who He represented – are in Scripture. We don't allow them now – Christ for all; God for all. 

But we've lost the meaning of that "for."

In the midst of our – umm, discussion – my friend said, you remember that woman who "trapped" Christ. The one about the dogs under the table.

Christ "made a mistake" in His more narrow view and had to retract it. 

She taught Him.

That is pure garbage. And I couldn't find the words I needed—and described 'around' them, and at an unsettled length. But after flailing about incoherently, I had them. He was testing her.

It is the traditional understanding of the passage.

But He knew the outcome. And that is the unspoken of the ancient writings – an awe-filled wonder at the insight of the Man. An insight schooled in 'allowing' others to come to the correct understanding.

He already had it. What that form of instruction is called, I'm not really certain these days: I have called it Socratic; that is the nearest I can come to it. 

And it's so quietly there – only the most foolish could miss the framing. Which – to be sure – I didn't point out & is part of the morning's musings. 

He agreed, then. See, the above [what my friend quoted] is some of the tommyrot floating about the Episcopal Church – obviously, he's been instructed in it. Someone wrote a book about it - or said it in a sermon. Maybe it was the Presiding Bishop's words. I've seen it around before.

He didn't admit this, and I didn't mention any of it. Saddens deeply that he would quote such, even in the heat of the arguments we have whenever theology works its way into our conversations.

Which it does, often. It is the heart of both of us; but we roost on opposing sides.

I'm nauseated, now. But late last night, after we rang off, the moment's insufficiencies & testiness behind us, I feared I'd vilified my Lord. Because to say that one point without amplification of the final 'completion' is risky. 

Terribly risky. Point/counterpoint. You can't say the one point & leave it there.

Yet to completely ignore the context of Christ's mission, as we do these days...

It would be broadened to include the Gentiles after the Resurrection.

But the things of the faith are eternal truths - not temporal. Life as we know it –  history as we remember & analyse it –  is temporal. A time-line-d reality. Which is why point/counterpoint is the necessity. The 'after' is included in the trajectory.

But the result – the process –  the way it all played out – is time-lined.

To walk through the restrictions and [later] understanding of the Church...the Gentiles are the wild branch, grafted onto the tree. We are not the faith vs. the Jews.

The Jews remain the 'natural branch' (Romans 11:1-29).

But they, too, must come to Christ. And will. But the passage as St. Paul composed it is difficult and here, analysis can only suggest. Proper analysis requires appropriate orientation. WHERE you interpret from—your beginning point, perhaps?—determines how you view. A step backward, even (a precursor), to context.

If your orientation is off, your analysis will be skewered.

Yes, certainly, to claim that – as Scripture details – Christ came for the Jews – that is both the evidence & the 'contradicting' of Scripture. The story of the woman mentioned above did not dispute His mission to His own – the exception proves the rule. Jump from there to St. Peter's vision – then to St. Paul's tongue-lashing of the saints at Jerusalem for ignoring the directive...the very power of transformation-in-its-making is lost if you jump to the end without the process before that end.

A Yogi-ism, perhaps. 

Yes, Christ came to save the world. But the Jewish framing – the true vs. wild vine – those are details most of Christianity through the centuries has either not remembered, not understood, or not cared for. 

Yes, Christ died for all. But not so that we could sashay in trumpeting our acceptance. Yes, He died for us exactly where we are.

But not so that we could stay there. Or declare our 'holiness' as is.

God indeed always meets us where we are. How can we know Him otherwise? Knowledge is perceived through a subjective lens - the act of perceiving occurs through a subjective lens.

But the journey only begins there. It does not end. (And if it should, the debt has been paid. But we have not earned our reward. And how that plays out in the Judgment Day is another place where perhaps temporal vs. eternal understanding - our lack of that more completed view - prevents any hope of understanding.

But I'm thinking here of innocents who die without a chance of working out their salvation.

Of being tested.)

But along those personal lines in which a life inevitably dwelleth, my friend has not turned out to be the man I'd hoped he would be, and the repercussions from his failure are life-changing for me.

Dream changing. Hope changing. Necessarily, they change who I am. Where my compass North is directed. 

I had hoped all along that he could change – could grow – could become the man God dreamed when He fashioned him into being and maybe, for me, that is a place where I insist on an ideal no man could attain. Or perhaps, merely this man cannot.

Love remains made of things I am not so certain I shall ever 'get.'.

But there – you see. The moment and I am off with it, seeing things that have little to do with a man and a woman. Everything to do with those archetypal (and yes, theological) realities so dear to me. The immediate and/or conscious act of God in forming each individual (i.e., Jeremiah 29:11, as it is heard in the present day) versus the randomly played out spontaneousness of the created world that continues creating – continues the original immediate and/or conscious act of God.

And in that spontaneousness – that continuation – the fluid hope of possibility. 

We are not puppets in the hands of a Master marionetteer.

That is free will. It is that place where things may or may not happen. Where Christ watches the woman who is not a Jew – what will she do when she is brushed aside?

It is why "only God knows" when the End will come.

It is why we say we have free will. It is why Christ could wait – and watch – and be amazed at the outcome. 

That is both the wonder & the Joy of the Creation – its expectant hush – the soap bubble blown into the moment – shimmering in the air – floating – iridescent, no? Rainbows trembling along its outer sphere – a ball so fragile it could pop from the very weight of the air about it—.

And will.

That is free will. The divine Gift to us – of life – of autonomy.

But God-given. God-breathed.

And God watches, and waits. 

[Editor's notes. Above are adapted from notes pursued in this morning's journal entry. As with the last post, that sense of 'peeking over someone's shoulder' is borrowed for a reader's 'beginning point' of inquiry.

The story two imperfect debaters referenced is Mark 7:25-30. Thanks as always to the Blue Letter Bible site for quick reference & study as I edited this post. 

A great many of the centuries of Christian thought have followed an interpretation of Scripture which prefers that the Gentiles (who did inherit the faith) are the true Israel. St. Paul said otherwise. 

But understanding of any element of the faith is dependent upon the terrain in which we work out our salvation: we will always be limited by what we see in the world about us. It is the place where our (global & communal use of the pronoun of mankind) thoughts take shape; those thoughts are the reality – the full scope and/or working material – of our ability to perceive.

No, it is not so disheartening as that might seem. We of the faith have what is handed down; always, too, we have the Helper.

And for mankind at large – those giants upon whose shoulders we stand. We don't live & die in the vacuum of our own thinking unless we are...most foolish.

Finally, the thinking of both a wee bird & the editor of passeres will always go to God's understanding of our (global use of the pronoun) frailty.

We just don't get it, after all, is just a modern phrasing of something Someone said a long while ago...

For those who prefer their theology without the personal framing that inevitably seeps in, apology for the above notes from a life. 

And for those of you who enjoy words quite so much as we do, the word 'marionetteer' does not appear to exist, although it is commonly used & refers to the puppet master behind the marionette strings.]

Scattered Passages

...looking for that ancient dignity - that respect for holiness which profoundly gives new birth. Not the sham of an outward display - but a spirit reborn.

Is that the significance of St. Paul's 'test the spirits.'

It's translated as plural.

Yet it is - it must be - test the spirit of a man.

Of each man.

See what he is made of.

Is he made of what is of God.

I have always understood it as spirits outside us.

And I say that quite aware that many in the modern faith do not at all accept even the existence of an Adversary, much less his dominions. (Merriam-Webster Online reminds dominion refers to an order of angels; as they note, the subject is covered in more depth under 'celestial hierarchies.'

Would that more 'got' that spirits & demons are indeed fallen angels...

Or who & what angels are.

A higher order than mere man, for those in need of such.)

But it is not the same with the Spirit. Christ said He would send Another.

A Helper. We are a finite, created being. When our Belovéd lulls us to slumber with definitive language, we must accept that language as it is given.

It was not metaphor.

It was not substance that lacks Personhood.

God as Father--.

Spirit as both Helper and Another.

Trinity.

Too many of us lack the dignity of holiness. We lead lives largely indistinguishable from those who do not know Christ. Do we know our Master?

Has He called us by name?

Do we bear His Name? (I will not argue over the Christ being a title. Our Lord had many names.

God with us. Prince of Peace. Wonderful Counselor.

The Anointed is but one of these.)

...Some weeks back, I began to pray for specific churches in the Diocese of Atlanta. No reason to give their names here: I only prayed for two. A visitor recently (like many churches, the one where I work hosts many meetings & events in its rooms during the week) asked me, "What do you do here?"

It was the plural usage of the pronoun, and his tone was high five, and testing.

I eyed then dismissed him over the edge of the work I was doing at my desk.

"We worship God here," I returned, matching him, sword for sword.

And I finished.

"What do you do in your church?"

Yet my sword was sheathed, and it was not the sword of angels, which few of us know how to wield anyway, even when such should prove needful!

He understood the dynamics of the exchange, and began to laugh, grudgingly but approving.

But someone called out, approaching from the hall. We did not parley further. He wandered off to his day outside our walls.

What do we do indeed.

The great question lingers.

...but I still lack prayer for the Presiding Bishop, and will note here in passing that my inability to do so figures in some very small way in my not returning to weekly fellowship with or support of my former church (that place of which I say, my membership is at - but I do not attend)...

I do not say this with a sword.

I note it aware that Christ said to pray for our enemies. (I use this term, but loosely: I intend it here merely to allow for 'those with whom I am not in agreement.'

Were all those with whom I am not in agreement my enemies, I would have a host to combat!)

And I understand prayer.

When you pray for your enemy, the Adversary's stronghold is breached.

That is love.

It has no other name.

[Editor's notes. Above comments were pulled & edited from passages in recent journal entries.

New readers note that the above refer to matters within the Episcopal church.

Also, the actual verse quoted is from the writings of the Apostle John and is found at 1 John 4:1. The word translated 'spirit' is the same word that is used for the Spirit of God and does refer to spirits outside a man's nature: to created beings, in short.

The reflection has been preserved here in spite of its unsubstantiated amplification.

For those who are more literal, I do not intend that a respect for holiness in & of itself 'gives new birth,' any more than St. Paul intended that having children should 'save' women.

Some sense of nuance intended - of a walking around an item, suggesting a little bit here, a little there - somewhat of the way sunlight in earliest morning plays upon green leaves - such subtleties - such variants in lighting - now light, now shaded.

Defining a thing is a process of much refining. And that remains a matter both of accurate Scriptural interpretation as much as of anything so hugely complex yet so splendidly simple...

Finally, the point that the Enemy has gained a stronghold in the Episcopal Church is a point with which many will disagree.

But we will leave it as borrowed for the use made of it - with the unstated (but surely visible) corollary that all of us remain in a state wherein we are in need of prayer...]