The End -

Shortly after immigrating, a trader from Warsaw was given a field in the Yehuda Clan district, as a loan and for safekeeping. He planted an apple orchard and came, in thirty years of apple growing, to appreciate pastoral life so much that he said he'd developed a sense of belonging to the land which actually meant a sense that the land belonged to him. This farmer then sold what he had come to call his field to a developer because, as he put it, "In the end, all must bend before greed."

.. from "Picnic Grounds a novel in fragments" by Oz Shelach ISBN 0-87286-419-7

Before Abraham was - I AM

"Forsaking all" - Your Voice
never falters, and yet,
unsealing day out of a
darkness none ever knew
in full but You,
you spoke that word, closing it forever:
"Why hast Thou forsaken ...?
This measure of your being all out, and
meaning it, made you
put it all on the line
we, humanly, wanted to draw - at
having you teacher only, or
popular spokesman only, or
doctor or simply a source of sanity
for us, distracted, or only
the one who would wholeheartedly
rejoice with us, and know
our tears, our flickering time, and
stand with us.

But to make it head over heals
yielding, all the way,
you had to die for us.
The line we drew, you crossed,
and cross out, wholly forget,
at the faintest stirring of what
you know is love, is one
whose name has been, and is
and will be, the
I AM.

- Margaret Avison

FOUR CRIES .. then mine.

Community Nurse of four years,
Appointed in house,
Doors should open.
Entered one house once!
Doors remained closed.


Muffled cry not heard.
Only five weeks old
Her cover a blanket,
Then came the weight,
One last cry.

Parents of the babe,
Return home drunk.
Drag their mattress onto floor,
collapse to sleep.
Next day tragic discovery.

Elder, beyond tears.
Heard and seen this before.
Another loss.
Stays with day's plan.
Press on - this will happen again.

This elder had invited me to visit special sites ... a great privilege.
Her cries were there ... they would be heard late at night as she remembers so many similar tragedies. I found all four reasons to cry. So easy for anger and judgement to arise. They are some of the emotions and responses for such matters but only some.

Deep Meaning, Exuberant Hope

This is the latest of Walter Brueggemann's books that I have commenced reading. It is the third of a series commenced in 1999 with 'The Covenanted self' followed in 2000 with 'Texts that Linger, Words that Explode'. While one should read in series I have this to read ... so I will.
The sub-title is 'Contested Truth in a Post-Christian World'. It is exactly that. We, I, can no longer speak from a triumphalist position to another. Mind you I don't believe we / I have ever had the right to speak from such a place. There is rarely if ever any respect for the other when we do.
This reflection will continue. I have been so confronted I knew it had to be placed on this page ... NOW.

Mahmoud Darwish - Palestinian Voice

[To a Killer] If you had contemplated the victim's face

And thought it through,
you would have remembered your mother in the Gas Chamber,
you would have been freed from the reason for the rifle

And you would have changed your mind: this is not the way

to find one's identity again ........

....

Alone, we are alone as far down as the sediment

Were it not for the visits of the rainbow ....

.....

A woman told the cloud: cover my beloved

For my clothing is drenched with his blood

Mahmoud Darwish died on Saturday 9th August aged 67

He was the Palestinian conscience. He had a very clear vision not only of who we are

but who we should be ...... Hanan Ashrawi

Jesus, the metaphorical Theologian

Already Tom Wright had triggered the importance of Parable for me, Kenneth Bailey has fleshed this out in his book - "Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes". He describes Jesus as a metaphorical Theologian, too often his parables lock Jesus into simple story teller. He goes on to write in explanation .... Jesus' primary method of creating meaning was through metaphor, simile, parable and dramatic action rather than through logic and reasoning. He created meaning like a dramatist and a poet rather than like a philosopher.

His parables were a source of Faith rather than ethics and for the first few centuries of the Christian experience this was how the faith was taught.

Bailey continues: "A parable is an extended metaphor and as such it is not a delivery system for an idea but a house in which the reader/listener is invited to take up residence."
Brueggemann also uses metaphor. The metaphor of 'exile' to assist the American Church - read most Western churches in coming to terms with the reality it faces today.
"The usefulness of a metaphor for rereading our own context is that it is not claimed to be a one- 0n - one match to 'reality' as though the metaphor of 'exile' actually describes our situation. Rather a metaphor proceeds by having only an odd, playful and ill-fitting match to reality, the purpose of which is to illuminate and evoke dimensions of reality which will otherwise go unnoticed and therefore unexperienced" : Cadences of Home p1

How do we see?

Bishop Tom Wright concludes his book “The Challenge of Jesus” with an anecdote about a visit to the Louvre in Paris ... to view the ‘Mona Lisa’ ... among other paintings. Their expectation was to see the painting. However, because of damage and the need to protect the painting with a glass casing what they saw were reflections of themselves, of others. ...... Even though the painting was there ...... Post modernism says that all that one can see is mere reflection of ourselves. The bishop challenges -
There is such a thing as a love, a knowing, a hermeneutic of trust rather than suspicion, which is what we most surely need in the twenty-first century:
A Paris newcomer, I’d never been
Followed by those dark eyes, bewitched by that
Half-smile, Meaning, like beauty, teases, dancing
In the soft spaces between portrait, artist,
And the beholder’s eye. But now, twice shy,
She hides behind a veil of wood and glass:
Suspicion, fear, mistrust - projections of
Our own anxieties. Is all our knowing
Only reflection? let me trust, and see,
And let love’s eyes pursue, and set me free.