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November/December, 2000
Look Out For Miracles
Father Zosimo, in Dostoevsky's THE BROTHERS
KARAMAZOV, says to his flock, "Children, do not seek miracles, for miracles kill
faith." What on earth might that mean? Perhaps this -- faith in an outward,
anomalous fact is not faith at all, but naive clinging to private, illusory
visions that we deeply wish to be real. Faith is letting go of the need for
literal verification.
Until my years at Duke Divinity School ('63), I
pretty much believed that the Bible had to be more or less literally true, but I
was never really comfortable with the logic of that position. One of my
assignments at Duke was to study the thought of Rudolph Bultmann, who suggested
that a person of true faith would not be shaken in his belief, if on Easter morn
there had been a film of the resurrection & nobody appeared. Why? Because
miracles and mythologies are linguistic methods of expressing faith, not the
essence thereof. Remember what THE LITTLE PRINCE in Euxpery's book said:
"What's essential is invisible to the eyes."
-- Bill Joyner
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...to call God
transcendent... does not mean that one must establish a "superworld" of
divine objects. It does mean that within itself, the finite world points
beyond itself. In other words, it is self-transcendent.
--Paul Tillich
To an open house in
the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
and a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.
Gilbert K. Chesterson
"So much depends
Upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens."
William Carlos
Williams
"Oh,
I'd better hurry. I've got to get some seeds. I've got to get some seeds,
right away. Nothing's planted. I don't have a thing in the ground."
--Willy
Loman in Arthur Miller's play, Death of a Salesman
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Education and Ecstasy
by George B. Leonard
For us of the West, there is no
better example of the mystic as rogue than Jesus. He followed his vision all
the way, though the changes he preached would have unglued the entire
reinforcement structure of Civilization, replacing law with love. He formulated
perhaps the most revolutionary educational prescription ever known: "Except ye
be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter in the kingdom
of heaven." Any respectable citizen would have to be far removed, in time and
place, from Calvary to think Jesus anything other than a rogue. It may be an
indictment of our time that we no longer consider Him so.
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Break the dance, and
scatter the song;
Let some depart, and some remain;
Wherever we fly we lead along
In leashes, like star-beams, soft and strong
The clouds that are heavy with love's sweet rain.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Love is the most
universal, formidable and mysterious of all cosmic energies."
--Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin
Only speak of hope.
--Corita
Kent
I have nothing to say,
and that is poetry.
-- John
Cage
A rule of warfare: it's
better to be stronger at the point where the fortune of the day is to be
decided, even at the cost of being deplorably weaker, if necessary,
everywhere else.
--Napoleon
I wish
there were some wonderful place,
Called the Land of Beginning Again,
Where all our mistakes and all our heartaches,
And all our selfish grief,
Could be dropped like a shabby old coat at the door
And never put on again.
Author
Unknown
An error is simply a
failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.
--John Cage
|
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Beware of Dogma
Today, I continue to have this
inner "lover's quarrel with the church" that began so long ago. It was around
1963 that I first saw the film
Zorba The Greek,
the pure realistic simplicity of which astounded me. I fixated upon the scene
where the local yokels of somewhere like Crete, drunk on their pious, jealous
superstitions, block the young woman (Irene Pappas), who has so grievously
wounded their pride by rejecting one of them, from entering the church -- as if
to say, "no one so unworthy of you can enter this sanctuary!" Then, just
outside the sacred precincts, they surround her and slit her throat as if she
were no more than a sacrificial goat! That, and other works by the author,
Nikos Kazantzakis, helped me become more & more wary of officially sanction,
popular forms of dogmatic religion, also; it made me aware of the arrogance that
religion can breed, as in the case of those who claim some kind of an
ultra-intimate relationship with the Unknowable and brag about "knowing" that
they're going to heaven, etc. Whatever true faith may be, I think it has very
little to do with absolute certainty.
--Bill Joyner
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Imagine This!
A continuous mobius
strip of verba-licious images, a multi-ringed, rainbow-circus of refracted
colors, a plethora of epiphanies! Graphic reminders of buried treasures,
brought to life again before our very eyes! Seeds of affirmation and
awareness to enrich the imagination. A whirlwind of fecundity in seminal
patterns of undifferentiated continuity! WOW! It must be THE 2001 SEED
CATALOG CALENDAR!
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THE 2001 SEED CATALOG CALENDAR
William T. Joyner
Editor |
Printed and spiral
bound 11" x 14" calendar available for a donation of $4.00 per copy plus
$1.50 mailing cost - for more information contact Bill Joyner
via U.S. Mail: P.O. Box 3411 / Sarasota, FL 34230
or email Bill at
[email protected] |
The Seed Catalog
William T. Joyner, Editor
THE SEED CATALOG is available by
mail for an annual suggested donation of $5.00
-- or any expression of interest. I try to do at least 6 issues a year. Thanks
for tuning in!
--Bill Joyner / P.O. Box 3411 / Sarasota, FL 34230
Send me your feedback - comments,
suggestions and contributions welcome