I am back, and am filled with opinions that have not quite jelled. It was much as I had thought – often crowded and too civilized – but also not: some beautiful areas that still ring with deep meaning, at least for me, and some real and obvious danger. I am not quite ready to dish, though, as said, and am suffering serious jet lag. Perhaps the puzzle will be solved by Tuesday or the end of the week. But there are a few things I will briefly mention, in whose depth I will delve into in a later essay. These concern sin and grace and belief, and the power, or lack of it, of place.
For the first, sin and grace and belief:
It was on my third day that I was seized with an absolute disgust with all things religious. I had had it. I wanted to leave this group and be free. What sort of madness was this, to tie myself to such a wheel of guilt when I could have near total freedom of action?
Slowly, however, the reality of the situation cleared again. For the first, belief in things Christian is not madness. If we consider the world as we really should understand it, not as we normally think we understand it, nearly all things are possible. This in itself does not prove death and resurrection by any means, but it makes it clear that it is as possible as anything else. In a world that came from nowhere, and in which we are leaving to another nowhere, miracles and heaven and all such things are all quite possible. How they came to seem probable again will be delved into later.
As for guilt, that’s the way it is once a certain sense of our situation becomes clear. When one is tapped with even a sliver of grace – something that just is – one sees that daily life is coarse; one – we – see clearly that we have another image within us. Sin, then, becomes not just those naughty things mentioned by priests and other destroyers of fun, but rather much of how we see and react to everyday life. We virtually live in sin, which does not mean that we are butchering babies or such, but that we are blind to a greater, perfect reality that runs through all ordinary perception and beyond. Guilt is our coarse way of acknowledging our coarseness; correction of our perception is the correct thing to do. Guilt goads us to this correction because it is uncomfortable.
Again, more on that, and the circumstances for its consideration, later. Now, the power of place:
When one walks into the tomb from which Jesus purportedly rose from the dead, one should be impressed. I can say that some, such as myself, feel only somewhat impressed. To build a cathedral around a cave so that that one can stand in line behind a gazillion people to see it reminds me of the Joni Mitchel lines, “They took all the trees/ And put them in a tree museum/ And they charged all the people/A dollar and a half just to see ‘em.” And yet, trees are impressive, museum or no. They are just more impressive in their natural environment, just as the tomb would be better as it was, open to the sky by the side of the rock of Golgotha.
And yet, there is something impressive about the ‘museum,’ and it feeds into the first of this little blog: belief. It is impressive, isn’t it, that they built a cathedral around the tomb of a poor man from a small town in a small, conquered country? Yes, very impressive. It speaks of something of enormous power.
And so we go from belief through place to belief here in a nutshell, which are the first thoughts from this hard-felt little pilgrimage/tour of ours. Again, and once more: more time is needed to digest it all, exactly because so much was in this museum that cannot really be put into a museum.
Later, then, for more. It’s good to be back.
I am back, and am filled with opinions that have not quite jelled. It was much as I had thought – often crowded and too civilized – but also not: some beautiful areas that still ring with deep meaning, at least for me, and some real and obvious danger. I am not quite ready to dish, though, as said, and am suffering serious jet lag. Perhaps the puzzle will be solved by Tuesday or the end of the week. But there are a few things I will briefly mention, in whose depth I will delve into in a later essay. These concern sin and grace and belief, and the power, or lack of it, of place.
For the first, sin and grace and belief:
It was on my third day that I was seized with an absolute disgust with all things religious. I had had it. I wanted to leave this group and be free. What sort of madness was this, to tie myself to such a wheel of guilt when I could have near total freedom of action?
Slowly, however, the reality of the situation cleared again. For the first, belief in things Christian is not madness. If we consider the world as we really should understand it, not as we normally think we understand it, nearly all things are possible. This in itself does not prove death and resurrection by any means, but it makes it clear that it is as possible as anything else. In a world that came from nowhere, and in which we are leaving to another nowhere, miracles and heaven and all such things are all quite possible. How they came to seem probable again will be delved into later.
As for guilt, that’s the way it is once a certain sense of our situation becomes clear. When one is tapped with even a sliver of grace – something that just is – one sees that daily life is coarse; one – we – see clearly that we have another image within us. Sin, then, becomes not just those naughty things mentioned by priests and other destroyers of fun, but rather much of how we see and react to everyday life. We virtually live in sin, which does not mean that we are butchering babies or such, but that we are blind to a greater, perfect reality that runs through all ordinary perception and beyond. Guilt is our coarse way of acknowledging our coarseness; correction of our perception is the correct thing to do. Guilt goads us to this correction because it is uncomfortable.
Again, more on that, and the circumstances for its consideration, later. Now, the power of place:
When one walks into the tomb from which Jesus purportedly rose from the dead, one should be impressed. I can say that some, such as myself, feel only somewhat impressed. To build a cathedral around a cave so that that one can stand in line behind a gazillion people to see it reminds me of the Joni Mitchel lines, “They took all the trees/ And put them in a tree museum/ And they charged all the people/A dollar and a half just to see ‘em.” And yet, trees are impressive, museum or no. They are just more impressive in their natural environment, just as the tomb would be better as it was, open to the sky by the side of the rock of Golgotha.
And yet, there is something impressive about the ‘museum,’ and it feeds into the first of this little blog: belief. It is impressive, isn’t it, that they built a cathedral around the tomb of a poor man from a small town in a small, conquered country? Yes, very impressive. It speaks of something of enormous power.
And so we go from belief through place to belief here in a nutshell, which are the first thoughts from this hard-felt little pilgrimage/tour of ours. Again, and once more: more time is needed to digest it all, exactly because so much was in this museum that cannot really be put into a museum.
Later, then, for more. It’s good to be back.
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