It's been a long time ...

   
A long time since I even thought about coming to these pages and writing something, saying something.

Both index fingers have been torn to shreds with me picking off dry skin, and doing so in quite an obsessive/compulsive manner, as if there were no tomorrow!

I am active and inactive by turn, moping about and very busy also by turn.

Aware that my feet and ankles are becoming swollen - perhaps with the warmer weather, perhaps because the GP stopped the Spironolactone about three weeks ago, even though I was taking it for its anti-androgenic properties rather than it’s sodium-retaining anti-hypertensive properties.

The skin on the ends of my index fingers is very hard and almost scale-like, to feel, although not to look at.  And the ends of those fingers are often quite blue, as if no blood, or very little blood, is getting to them.

I am not really a very happy camper, at the moment, although I am not entirely sure why that is so, apart from recently having had a nasty head cold that did leave me feel really “blah” for a week or more once it started to clear up a bit!

I wonder if I have somehow lost a part of who I thought I was, or perhaps even who I imagined I was.  I do not have many friends, and I have little or no contact with the lesbian community, even though Marion is my executor.  Part of being an intellectual snob, perhaps, and not tolerating fools easily.  No real personal struggles.

Although - is that really true, because part of studying theology has meant a deeper questioning about the truth, relative or otherwise, of some of the stuff we seem to take for granted, as Christians.

Don, on Wednesday, suggesting that whenever there is any sort of doubt or confusion, faith will take precedence over reason, or revelation over reason - and it did not feel or seem right to me and yet I could not, at that time, articulate why that would be so - for me, anyway.

If the stories we have in the Bible about Creation, for example, are basically derived from the co-existing Epic of Gilgamesh and several other epic poems extant at the time, albeit with some adaptations to mesh with their own Hebrew conceptions of God and creation and life and everything, then why should the Hebrew version be regarded as being any more “correct” than the original Sumerian version, from which it has been derived?  In a world in which very little was explained, and much of which was inexplicable, because so much of the research and discovery had yet to be done, sometimes it is story rather than science, revelation rather than reason, that holds the key to the question of the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

When I was a child, all I had was the feeling side of things, to a large extent, and story helped me make sense of stuff more than reason or science - although I do also need to say that I have always been curious and have often gone outside story, per se, to find answers to questions.

That notion of being “curiously unfinished” at birth, and the electrical system in the body needing about 12 years to mature before critical thought is possible.

I can see parallels right throughout the Creation story and other stories in the Bible of the Jews relationship with Yahweh with the process of human growth and development from even before birth through to adulthood and “maturity.”  Not because the Bible tells me there are parallels but because I have put several pieces of different kinds of information and knowledge together in order to make greater sense, for my self, of what this life is really all about.

And, then, the thought that, in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the other Sumerian literature, the storytellers - and their audiences - were trying to make some sort of sense of life and life in the face of nature apparently random “attacks” on them, as well as questions of life and death, etc., etc., etc., just as the Hebrews were trying to make sense of their experiences of Yahweh in a generally hostile world in their stories about life, death, war and so on, so why should we  - or I - take any real notice of what these stories say?  They are not texts handed down by some God who lives, in a skin, somewhere up in the sky, and dictates things to men, so that “revelation” in the form of stories of miracles, victories in battle, etc., becomes part of our basic understanding of the nature of God in this day and age.  They are groups of people interacting, tossing ideas around, considering possibilities, weighing up the pros and cons of ideas of about - none of it is God-given, in the sense that I was taught as a child to believe was the way in which God worked.  None of it is “true,” in the sense that it really, really happened just like it says in the Bible and as expounded by preachers and clergy down the years.

Those councils in the 4th and 5th centuries were not God sorting out the theology - but they were Church Fathers getting together to discuss the best ways of answering their critics!  Writing statements of belief that would be definitive creeds and the bases for catechesis!  Arguing about the minutiae of meaning in Greek words - not even Hebrew words, but Greek words - to convey what “God really means” and who “Jesus really is.”

And, yet, I continue to behave as if I believe these stories.

Perhaps because there is a wisdom in them that can only be conveyed in story, a wisdom which may well be much, much greater than the idea of God being portrayed, or attempting to be portrayed in sermons and theology and whatnot!  Perhaps I need to look behind the preaching and the teaching of preachers and teachers of theology, to find the wisdom in them, wisdom which could inform my life, even now, as I enter these last years of my life.  Do I need to work out a systematic theology - or is all that is required is to love others as I love my self?  The essence of the wisdom of Jesus, the Christ …

Wendell Berry on gay marriage

       
This article, from the Associated Baptist Press, is well worth a read -

http://www.abpnews.com/culture/social-issues/item/8130-wendell-berry-expounds-on-gay-marriage#.UYVwzKJTB_B