Walking around on Resurrection ground
September 30, 2011 Leave a comment
OCTOBER
Old earth tone
Palettes congregate,
Line the streets
***
Crispy air
Shuffles khaki leaves,
Remember
***
Cinnamon
Sticks in the throat
Of mull jugs
***
Pumpkins gloat
As ghouls beg for more,
Wrappers fall
***
Full moon lit
Shadows emerge –
Negatives
© Sally Paradise, 2011, All Rights Reserved
September 27, 2011 Leave a comment
I have often returned to the eyewitness account of Jesus walking on the water and of Peter’s eager attempt to do the same. I do so especially when I am not sure about my next step.
It is an unusual account not only because the rules of physics were usurped but also because Jesus is meeting the men in the midst of their daily work.
Peter and the others made their living as fisherman. Everything they needed depended on the day’s catch. The families of these men and the markets were waiting at home. So come hell or high water they would go out on the Sea of Galilee trawling for fish.
One night hell and high water came –a fierce storm suddenly arose. Their small fishing boat was buffeted by the wind and the waves. The sail was useless and rowing had become impossible. Their whole effort was used to keep an even keel so as not to capsize and lose their nets in the process.
In the rain-swept darkness there suddenly walked a figure – a man walking on the water towards them. Perhaps, they thought, it is a ghost. No one in their right mind would be out in this weather and certainly not for a stroll on the sea. This did not bode well for superstitious fishermen.
During a streak of lightning, perhaps, Peter thinks he recognizes the profile of Jesus. At this point Peter might have said to himself, “Jesus! Jesus is not safe. He’s way out on the deep end. Walking on water just might be another one of those “Jesus things’ that keep you guessing. But, my gut tells me to go with it for now.”
Out of the gale comes a voice, “Take courage! It is I.Don’t be afraid.”
So Peter yells, “Lord, if it is you, tell me to come to you on the water.” And Jesus said “Come!”
Peter stood up in the small boat almost tipping it over. Unsteady, heart racing, he grabbed the hull with one hand and lifted his right leg out of the boat. He put his right foot down on the water. His foot made no hole in the water. He slowly shifted his balance and brought his left leg out of the boat. Peter stood on the substance of things not seen. He straightened up and looked over at Jesus. The storm was still raging behind the apparition-turned-Apotheosis.
Yet, in an instant the full weight of Peter’s reason, creating a confluence of fear, opened the sea below him like a watery trap door. He sank down into water over his head.
Treading in the choppy waters as best he could, Peter cried for help, “Lord, save me!”
Jesus caught hold of Peter’s hand and pulled him up. While holding Peter’s hand and looking Peter square in the eye (I can only imagine.) Jesus said, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”
“And when they climbed into the boat, the wind died down. Then those who were in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.” “
Hoisting the sail, Peter and the crew got back to the business at hand – making a living from being gut sure of what they hoped for and being more certain of what they did not see – fishing.
The eyewitness account that relates Peter’s story is recorded in Matthew’s Gospel (14:22-33)
September 25, 2011 Leave a comment
The other day I was shopping at a Barnes and Noble Bookstore. Over in the Music/DVD section I was purchasing the Howard’s End DVD. As the sale rang up I could hear the high-pitched sound of a young girl’s voice singing behind me. I turned and saw a pre-teen sitting at a music display. She was wearing headphones and singing quite loudly, oblivious to the people around her.
My first thought was “I remember doing that. How neat.” But my quickly heart sank when I realized that she was singing the words to Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream:
“Let’s go all the way tonight,
No regrets, just love,
We can dance until we die,
You and I we’ll be young forever.”…
‘We drove to Cali and got drunk on the beach
Got a motel and made a fort out of sheets
I finally found you, my missing puzzle piece
I’m complete…
I’ma get your heart racing in my skin tight jeans
Be your teenage dream tonight
Let you put your hands on me in my skin tight jeans
Be your teenage dream tonight..
You make me feel like I’m living a teenage dream
The way you turn me on, I can’t sleep…
How does this situation make you feel? Are you outraged or would you just laugh it off?
Have you seen the music video? Do you realize that young children are watching Glee and hearing these words?
I won’t display the Katy Perry music video. Here is Darren Criss (Blaine) along with “The Dalton Academy Warblers” singing all of “Teenage Dream” in Season 2, Episode 6 of Glee titled “Never Been Kissed”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrYRIFjosr4
The TV program Glee is a type of peer pressure inviting our kids to emulate what is presented each week is it not? Children want to be in sync with their peers. It is very troubling to see the gift of human sexuality being talked about so cavalierly. I see it portrayed as an extension of the Disney ‘fluff fantasy” characterization of childhood and not as a sacred endowment from a holy God.
Kids have enough to deal with without the constant barrage of sexual promiscuity and depravity that is promoted by the media. Letting your child come in contact with this type of overreaching influence is comparable to sexual abuse of a minor.
Where are this girl’s parents? Maybe they are in the café drinking coffee, hoping to stave off the night of the teenage dream.
September 24, 2011 Leave a comment
Yesterday, a beautiful first day of autumn, I seized a day off from work for a field trip with the rector and some friends from our church. Our group visited the Marion E. Wade Center Center at Wheaton College in Wheaton, IL.
The Wade Center, as the brochure states, “houses a major research collection of writings by and about seven British authors: Owen Barfield, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams…Together they produced more than four hundred books including novels, drama, poetry, fantasy, books for children and Christian works.”
You may be more familiar with two of these writers by the movie versions of their works: C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia stories and J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings stories. (It is said that Peter Jackson is currently back working in New Zealand on his film production of Tolkein’s Hobbit story.)
“The Wade center has both a museum (where I saw Lewis’s desk, the handmade wardrobe built by his father (filled with fur coats, btw), Mr. Lewis’ pipe and his pewter ale tankard among many other pieces. There was also J.R.R. Tolkien’s tiny desk where he began writing the manuscript for Hobbit) and the Kilby Reading Room, an area for research and the study of the authors.”
I was very excited to be able to handle a small book offered to me by the Kilby Room archivist. The small book owned by Lewis, which title I cannot presently remember, was on the nature of the Italian civilization. The book bore Lewis’ signature and marginalia! The inscribed book and his desk are the closest I would ever come to C. S. Lewis. Touching the firm reality of those things I felt transcendent as well – a touchstone moment for me.
Information about the Rabbit Room, the Eagle and Child Pub and the Inklings can be found here: click here.
Here is a small excerpt from John Piper’s book Don’t Waste Your Life. This passage relates Piper’s first encounter with C.S. Lewis’ writings. It perfectly describes Lewis as a “romantic-rationalist”: poet-novelist & intellectual apologist, both Upper Story and the Lower Story in one person. It is no wonder I seek to emulate the life of one C.S. (Jack) Lewis!
Here’s the Piper passage about Lewis:
“Someone introduced me to Lewis my freshman year with the book, Mere Christianity. For the next five or six years I was almost never without a Lewis book near at hand. I think that without his influence I would not have lived my life with as much joy or usefulness as I have. There are reasons for this.
He has made me wary of chronological snobbery. That is, he showed me that newness is no virtue and oldness is no vice. Truth and beauty and goodness are not determined by when they exist. Nothing is inferior for being old, and nothing is valu¬able for being modern. This has freed me from the tyranny of novelty and opened for me the wisdom of the ages. To this day I get most of my soul-food from centuries ago. I thank God for Lewis’s compelling demonstration of the obvious.
He demonstrated for me and convinced me that rigorous, precise, penetrating logic is not opposed to deep, soul-stirring feeling and vivid, lively—even playful—imagination. He was a “romantic rationalist.” He combined things that almost every¬body today assumes are mutually exclusive: rationalism and poetry, cool logic and warm feeling, disciplined prose and free imagination. In shattering these old stereotypes, he freed me to think hard and to write poetry, to argue for the resurrection and compose hymns to Christ, to smash an argument and hug a friend, to demand a definition and use a metaphor.
Lewis gave me an intense sense of the “realness” of things. The preciousness of this is hard to communicate. To wake up in the morning and be aware of the firmness of the mattress, the warmth of the sun’s rays, the sound of the clock ticking, the sheer being of things (“quiddity” as he calls it). He helped me become alive to life. He helped me see what is there in the world—things that, if we didn’t have, we would pay a million dollars to have, but having them, ignore. He made me more alive to beauty. He put my soul on notice that there are daily wonders that will waken worship if I open my eyes. He shook my dozing soul and threw the cold water of reality in my face, so that life and God and heaven and hell broke into my world with glory and horror.
He exposed the sophisticated intellectual opposition to objective being and objective value for the naked folly that it was. The philosophical king of my generation had no clothes on, and the writer of children’s books from Oxford had the courage to say so.
You can’t go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to “see through” first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see. (CSL)
Oh, how much more could be said about the world as C. S. Lewis saw it and the way he spoke. He has his flaws, some of them serious. But I will never cease to thank God for this remarkable man who came onto my path at the perfect moment.”
*****
September 18, 2011 Leave a comment
The Obama dream of a different America under his progressive mandates (picking winners and losers) comes with a heavy price tag and I am not just referring to economic burdens being placed on the shoulders of Americans. Obama’s demand for tax increases for corporations will further necessitate corporations passing the cost onto consumers. And, no one will be immune from Obama’s ‘class warfare’ tax plan. It is a shell game (hide the tax increases under the ‘rich/corporation/inheritance tax’ shell). Every tax affects every American. Trickle down taxation is guaranteed.
It is the American family which will suffer the most under Obama’s progressive ideologies. Consider the American family right now. The family is under attack. Beyond the absurdity of homosexual marriage being legalized as on par with male-female marriage (Reason, of course, tells you otherwise) and the horrendous rate of divorce encouraged by state laws which allow No-Fault divorce coupled with the almost guaranteed child support (a ‘dead-beat’ parent penal system for fathers is created in the process) parental absenteeism is at an all time high. This is due to the increased need to work more to pay for the increased cost of living (which includes inflation) created by corporations being taxed more. It should be noted that our country has the second highest corporate tax rate (39.3% (average combined federal and state).in the world, second only to Japan. (It is no wonder that Obama’s jobs czar Jeffrey Imelt, CEO of GE, has GE paying no corporate taxes here in the US.)
I dare say increased taxation (via increased consumer costs) goes hand in hand with decreased family values. And, it is happening now. Time spent with your family, with your children, will be devoured trying to play catch up with your finances. Parents want to provide for their children. Parents want the best for their children and parents will sacrifice for their children. Obama’s short-sighted plans will rob parents of the net pay that would allow parents to spend time with their children.
You know this already: when parents are not around children get in trouble. Children may cruise the cable TV channels and watch totally inappropriate programs, programs that are now on at all hours of the day. Children will cruise the internet seeing things that no child should ever see. They may hang with friends who are no good or worse, they may hang around with gangs. You will lose your children to the arbitrariness of a world not sharing your values. (Many parents have despaired of even trying to be a parent, believing that more money might make things better for the child.)
Increased taxation and increased government dependence means a decreased share of net income for the family. It means less ownership of your family values and the American dream, as well. What good is the American Dream if is not shared tangibly with your children?
(Perhaps you are a progressive who disparages the American Dream. You may then pass along the inherent poverty of radicalism as a way of life. So be it. Just don’t make me pay for it.)
Fathers are the most likely to take a hit in Obama’s tax schemes. They will have to spend more time working. Many mothers will also have to work.
Single mothers will have to work harder. They will also seek government assistance to provide for their family. Continually receiving this type of hand-out is demoralizing. This demoralizing effect quickly becomes a poor self-image. A parent’s poor self-image is easily passed on to their kids who ultimately learn that they must depend on government for their daily bread and that mom is the enabler and that dad is a loser.
A vote for Obama was a vote to build an Illinois Hope & Change casino in Washington D.C. Like it or not you and your family are mandated to play through taxation. You may break even, you may “Win the Future” but most likely, you will lose. The odds (and the lobbyists) are stacked against you. Over time you will lose everything.
Before Obama there were many Chicago hoods shaking down businesses for money. Remember Al Capone. The American family deserves better than the “fat-cat” Obama from Chicago – the guy who wants to “drill-baby-drill” down into your pocketbook.
September 17, 2011 Leave a comment
The answer to poverty in our lifetime is not government. It is not voting for someone who will make us feel better about the situation. It is not the vicarious experience of giving offered by paying a little more taxes. This type of arm’s length indifference is much like the behaviors of the priest and the Levite who had each passed a man lying on the road.
This man, a Samaritan, had been accosted by robbers, leaving him penniless. Both priest and Levite were well versed in the rules and regulations that governed their lives. They both acted out of those rules and regulations and not out of love. They both gave at the office.
Progressives like to think of themselves as Good Samaritans and yet they vote like how the priest and Levite responded – this problem is beyond me, the system should fix this.
Giving is meant to be a one-on-one intimacy – the poor are to be helped directly. The answer is personal involvement. In doing so, both parties benefit and, more importantly, God, not government, is honored.
We are told in Scripture that we are to do our giving in secret. The right hand should not know what the left hand is doing. Yet, we have politicians on the Left (hand) and social gospel gurus who publicly demand that government be the arbiter of who is poor and the benefactor to the poor. They take great pride in their social justice message. It is their platform.
It is common among progressive voters to look for deep pockets and then to vote in politicians who will enact laws and regulations which will divest those pockets of wealth in order to provide for the poor (basically, everyone not rich). This is wealth redistribution and it is at the heart of ‘been-there-done-that’ socialism.
Many college kids (taking worthless courses) and liberal college professors (those unable to find real jobs) voted for Obama because of his campaign rhetoric calling for wealth redistribution. Class warfare has become a war cry of the progressive voter – pitting one group against another. This is not Christ. This is not being a Good Samaritan. This behavior is more akin to Pharisee-ism than anything else. Pretense veils the eyes of many in this group of voters.
Common sense should tell you that with less government there is less need for tax money. And, with less tax money being taken out of your pocket there is more money left for you to give to the poor. But, undoubtedly, it is human nature to submit to the group thinking of socialism rather than to act individually. It is also human nature to want someone else to be responsible for a problem and for us to look good applying ourselves to that end. In other words, we, like the Levite in the Good Samaritan story, tend to be Pharisaic by staying away from the problem, letting others become involved directly.
If you want to help the poor then look around you. Get involved with your neighbors. Get off your ass (see the Good Samaritan parable for more detail), stop texting ‘socialisms’ to your buddies and do the best thing for the poor – give of yourself.
*****
Liberalism is a parlor game, where one, for a small stipend, is allowed to think he is aiding starving children in X or exploited workers in Y, when he is merely, in the capitalist tradition, paying a premium, tacked on to his goods, or subtracted from his income, for the illusion that he is behaving laudably (cf. bottled water).
David Mamet from his book The Secret Knowledge: On Dismantiling of American Culture
Cindy Wity 
The Discriminating Voter Du Jour
September 28, 2011 Leave a comment
Overheard in a restaurant this past Saturday morning:
“Good Morning. Coffee, Ma’am?”
“Yes.”
“Cream and Sugar?”
“I like my coffee like my presidents, hot and black.”
Soon after, by her boisterous one-way table conversation, I could tell that this woman with the black coffee was a liberal democrat. She made sure that everyone in the room knew she was a liberal Democrat. The restaurant happens to be in a very Republican county of Illinois.
Sadly, I had an acid Flashback:
…breaking away from the effete imagery, I also became puzzled…
I was surprised that the woman’s coffee preference analogy went straight past a whole vending machine selection of delectable liberal Dems!: Al Franken, Barbara Boxer, Charlie Rangel, Barney Frank, Anthony Weiner, Maxine Waters, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi!
DWTS Section:
What do Obama and Chaz Bono have in common? both are activists and both are out of step with the voters.
Food Section:
Cocktails anyone?
How about Captain Morgan Freeman on the rocks!
Movie actor & Tea Party authority, Morgan Freeman:
Please Morgan, play a new role for us and not the role of the sage old black man helping troubled whiteys. (Buyer beware: The cinema public is currently being inundated with Morgan Freeman castings! Does this mean he got the part instead of a hispanic or an asian actor?)
Friends Don’t Let Friends Blather Racism!
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Filed under Short Story Tagged with democrats, DWTS, liberals, Morgan Freeman, Obama, political, political commentary, progressives, Tea Party