Sara J. (kefuwa) > Recent Status Updates

We necessarily sift a great many pebbles, much sand, for each nugget — but the nuggets are the reward.

I had an unsettling feeling that I had been completely mistaken as to the very nature of the world I was in, as if every part of it was something wildly different from what it appeared to be -- like discovering that your own mother isn't anyone you've ever seen before, but a stranger in a rubber mask.

We supply the violence; other people—'older and wiser heads,' as they say—supply the control. Which is as it should be.

Not killing...but controlled and purposeful violence. But it's not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It's never a soldier's business to decide when or where or how—or why—he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how.

There can be circumstances when it's just as foolish to hit an enemy city with an H-bomb as it would be to spank a baby with an axe. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him...but to make him do what you want to do.

"The only unforgivable sin in war is standing still,' Jedao said. "It's better to be doing the wrong thing wholeheartedly than to freeze.'

The problem with authority is that if you leave it lying around, others will take it away from you.

These are days spent suffering the absence of Jesus, days of darkness, whose heaviness can be sensed in the mother's words: "Child, why have you treated us so? Behold your father and I have been looking for you anxiously: (Lk 2:48). Thus an arc extends from this first Passover of Jesus to his last, the Passover of the Cross.

The 3 days may be explained in quite practical terms: Mary&Joseph had spend one day travelling north, a further day was needed in order to retrace their steps, & on the third day they eventually found Jesus. While the three days are thus a perfectly plausible chronological indication, one must nevertheless agree with Rene Laurentin when he detects here a silent reference to the 3 days between Cross and resurrection.

The supposed of actual birth of a Messianic king would inevitably bring trial and tribulation to the people of Jerusalem. They knew Herod, after all. What from the lofty perspective of daily life is merely a disturbance, a cause for concern and fear. It is true: God disturbs our comfortable day-to-day existence. Jesus' kingship goes hand in hand with his Passion.

The key point is this: the wise men from the east are a new beginning. They represent the journeying of humanity toward Christ. They initiate a procession that continues throughout history. Not only do they represent the people who have found the way to Christ: they represent the inner aspiration of the human spirit, the dynamism of religions and human reason toward him.

They represent an inner dynamic of religion toward self-transcendence, which involves a search for truth, a search for the true God & hence "philosophy" in the original sense of the word. Wisdom, then, serves to purify the message of "science": the rationality of that message does not remain at the level of intellectual knowledge, but seeks understanding in its fullness&so raises reason to its loftiest possibilities.

All kinds of factors could have combined to generate the idea that the language of the star contained a message of hope. But none of this would have prompted people to set off on a journey, unless they were people of hope, people on the lookout for the true star of salvation. The men of whom Matthew speaks were not just astronomers. The were "wise".

Oh shiz. Been having a busy week! I will update my finished books over the weekend yo!

Actually read the first 80 pages sometime in December 2017 but put it down to finish some other book I had going on. Haha.

Sun catches cheap plate flaking - I am a tinker; the moon is an egg glowing in its nest of leafless trees- I am a poet; a brochure for an asylum is on the dresser- I am an epileptic, insane; the house is behind me-I am a fugitive.

Howard thought, Is it not true: A move of the head, a step to the left or right, and we change from wise, decent, loyal people to conceited fools? Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed infinitely:

Everything is made to perish; the wonder of anything at all is that it has not already done so. No, he thought. The wonder of anything is that it was made in the first place. What persists beyond this cataclysm of making and unmaking?

Man's "contradiction" of God runs all the way through history. What proves Jesus to be the true sign of God is that he takes upon himself the contradiction of God, he draws it to himself all the way to the contradiction of the Cross.

Beneath the language about falling & rising of many, there are echoes of a prophecy from Is 8:14, in which God himself is designated as a rock against which men stumble & fall. So within the Passion saying, we see the deep bond that links Jesus with God himself. God & his word-Jesus, God's living word-are "signs", challenging us to make a choice.

The theology of glory is inseparably linked with the theology of the Cross. The Suffering Servant has the great mission to bring God's light to the world. Yet it is in the darkness of the Cross that that mission is fulfilled.

...but also independent now of his will, showing him a different self every time he tried to make an assessment

George Crosby remembered many things as he died, but in an order he could not control. To look at his life, to take the stock he always imagined a man would at his end, was to witness a shifting mass, the tiles of a mosaic spinning, swirling, reportraying, always in recognizable swaths of colors, familiar elements, molecular units, intimate currents...

The "just" are those who inwardly live the ordinances of the law aright - those who walk their path in righteousness, according to the revealed will of God and open up space for new action in the Lord. In them, Old and New Covenant converge and combine to form a single history of God with men.

Whereas Matthew gives a clear & theologically symbolic structure to his genealogy, Luke arranges his 76 names without any outwardly recognizable pattern. Yet here too a symbolic structuring of historical time can be detected: the genealogy contains 11 times 7 members. Luke may have known the apocalyptic formula that divides world history into twelve parts and at the end consists of eleven times seven generations.

He taught that there are no intransigent opposites except in the beliefs of men and, sometimes, in their dreams. One discovers the future in the past, and both are part of a whole.