May 9th, 2019

“Hmmmm.”

I’m not sure what to write. Can’t even come up with a snappy title (hence the date). But I’m committed to following through on a discipline (like blogging) whenever the motivation and the means are present…so here I am!

I’m always looking for connection, synchronicity, synergy – in a certain sense: order. Not a rigid, clinical kind. A natural, seamless kind of order that makes sense of things like the weather AND my mood simultaneously. An order that explains the state of geopolitics AND the politics going on at our local school board. I want to perceive and monitor the intermingling and interactions of all of Creation, from my own inner workings to the movement of the stars. I regularly sense the larger, cosmic machinery of the world clicking away, but at a tempo and of a scale that makes me wonder if I’m really sensing anything at all. After all, humans are amazingly proficient at pattern recognition, and historically adept at recognizing patterns that aren’t there at all.

People rush into claims of “prophecy” and “discernment” because they’ve become convinced that they are gifted. They have “vision” and they can perceive the times. Movements, nations, empires and holocausts have begun with the earnest conviction on the part of an otherwise functional human being that they see a pattern emerging, and so strive to engage with it…or resist it.

I feel the world pulling apart. Polarizing. I feel the cosmic machinery starting to rumble and grind and smoke as it begins to tear itself apart. I sense it at the smallest scale: those individuals around me. I sense it on the scale of region, and nation. I sense it globally and climatologicaly.

I see it in dying whales in Puget Sound. In dying glaciers in the Cascades. I see it in dying churches and dying families. I see it in dying people, found alone hunched over their bathtubs after 3 days; alcohol poisoning.

A hanging.

A 17 year old fentanyl overdose.

Another troubled child with nothing like a home to return to after another miserable day in the chaos of public school.

Lying and self-promotion are now lauded. The accepted response to a perceived slight is cowardly violence, verbal or otherwise. The only bigotry tolerated is for those accused of bigotry. The only intolerable: intolerance. Human life, from conception to senility, is nothing more then a construct.

It’s in the eyes and in the angst of my colleagues and friends who “feel it too”, who are struggling to find the way forward. It’s In the slack faces and dry eyes of our children, standing hopeless and unmoved. It’s in the hateful words spit from left and right. It’s in the presumption of guilt, the loss of dignity and the addiction to self.

But people have sensed all this before, and it has come to nothing…

Lord have mercy.

One thought on “May 9th, 2019

  1. “and the addiction to self.” — THIS!

    I´m wondering, though, if we have all seen this before is what we are going through both locally and globally a new “zeitgeist”, or simply a reproduction of the old?

    My faith sensibilities tell me there is no such thing as a “zeitgeist” and that we are all on a historical trajectory toward the final end, but part of me seems to think we simply (and even randomly) just keep repeating the same, ugly game over and over.

    Maybe we need to read as a group the following:

    Ortega y Gasset — The Revolt of the Masses

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