I laughed and laughed friendly laughs at your fine post.
This is very . . . significant:
My expectation is this, more or less: We are discussing issues which demand the best from our will and our minds as each of us offer them to God and ask Him to bless our work. We all know, or should know, that raising the emotional temperature by mockery and personal assault, by careless and disparaging misstatement, and the rest is more than likely to obscure communication and to hinder thought, and to make charity less likely. Yet it seems that many of us, on all sides, bring to the table only rhetoric which vastly diminishes the probability of true communication in charity. I’ve done it myself. I’m trying HARD not to do it. This is hard work and it is important work.
= = =
I don’t know how to articulate where I am on such things better. But the above paragraph strikes me as it strikes you when folks say: THIS IS WHAT IS WRONG WITH WHAT YOU BELIEVE when you know it’s not what you believe.
I do understand that
that IS how I come across to you often enough. And, I’m sad about that. Therefore what . . . will have to continue to prayerfully ponder. I’m sad that the result may still be me, being essentially me in this or that list of ways or specifics.
And, I’m NOT trying to excuse some perverse part of me in any sort of license sort of way.
Anyway . . . I still love you greatly. Am at the college and was just going to peek without responding before I went back to the mud on the wheel.
What we have here is a failure to, uh, procrastinate, is that right? Something like that, anyway.
I'm struggling to articulate that the colors and text sizes, the twisting of our terms into terms of mockery, the gratuitous "list of other fantasies" (when we already KNOW you don't think we're right on this doctrine) these not only obscure the communication of ideas (that's WAY subjective -- maybe I should limit it to us ADHD members of the DNA - National Dyslexics Association) but also raise the emotional temperature -- and that by now ample evidence has been given of that, and another body has been carried off the field and cast into the outer dorkness (typo intentional)
You respond that reading that you feel like I seem to feel when somebody says I'm just so wrong about X, where X is something neither I nor my Church maintain.
I would put that at about, say 85% sad frustration and the remaining 95% sudden impulse to kill puppies or express anger in some other way. Am I close?
When I was in seminary, where supposedly it's safe to try junk like this, I preached a (very self-)righteous sermon in my field work parish about how it was sorta kinda NOT a good idea to say "Lord, Lord" while carefully avoiding doing anything resembling the will of the Father, and it was more than sorta kinda dangerous to keep saying "The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord" to reassure oneself that nothing bad was ever going to happen, when at the same time one was spititng into the wind and worse.
I received warm and affectionate from my auditors. Nearly everyone agreed that it was a fine sermon and they certainly hoped that THOSE people would hear it and profit from it. THEY themselves, however, were absoltuely in agreement and had always thought so.
Arrgh!
That was when I learned that I needed to offer not only what I said but how I said it to the Lord -- or when I began to learn it -- still kinda working on it.
So, I guess I'm thinking that part of consecrating, handing over, offering, blah blah your life to Christ is to hand over not only the quod but also the quomodo
Mind you, 5 years ago I had long hair and a beard and a flock of real not parabolic sheep, while now I sport a high-and-tight left over from sheriff office days and a mustache which is saved from sliminess only by it's being, to my chagrin, white (I was going for menacingly slimey - and all I got was geezer!). In other words, my unalienable right to look like a slob was in play when God called me back onto the field of battle.
And, for an even earlier example, the boss-lady says it was amazing how I cleaned up my language when I was head-teacher of a child care center.(This is the LORD's doing, and it is marvellous in our @#*&#$$&*&# eyes.)
Come on, beloved of the Lord, you KNOW that one thing The Lord of Hosts shares with the most brutal pagan god of some terrified and savage imagining is that He requires you to give to Him what is most dear to you. The difference is he gives it back a thousand-fold, with sprinkles AND glitter.
Which is NO reason to start using glitter in your posts.