The Old Paths
The reading appointed for today: Jer. 6: 9-21
“To whom shall I speak and give warning, That they may hear? Indeed their ear is uncircumcised, And they cannot give heed. Behold, the word of the Lord is a reproach to them…. Thus says the Lord: Stand in the ways and see, And ask for the old paths, where the good way is, And walk in it; Then you will find rest for your souls.”

Lord where is the good way? Teach me Your paths. Because of your
grace give me an undivided heart that I might fear your Name.

"The evanescence of human life is the reason for human ceremony. Since things pass, things must be repeated. Only the eternal can dispense with repetition. The ideal of epiphany, the thirst for what Americans call "peak experiences": all this is a little cowardly, an attempt to escape the consequences of living in time. Of course, the epiphany may arrive; but after the epiphany, there will arrive the moment after the epiphany. The peak experience will peak. And there will occur, the experience of eschatological disappointment."
I wonder if Paul experienced this disappointment. What was life like right after the vision on the road to Damascus? Did he expect the establishment of the Kingdom on earth in his life time like some of the others? Was this experience formative for his willingness to die for the sake of the gosple? "...better to be with the Lord..." Maybe St. Thomas was lucky to have died so soon after his vision. How did Paul manage to keep from loosing the fervor of his experience?



"The heavy summer air was filled with fireflies, hundreds of them, burning
and vanishing, burning and vanishing. The park was a field of floating,
passing intensities. I sat for a while and watched the little eruptions of
brilliance. Wherever I looked, there was the beginning and the ending of
light. No light lasted long, but there was not a moment of total darkness.
This, I thought, is another ideal of illumination."

"The glow passes. But the afterglow need not pass. The problem is that its
survival is in our hands. Unlike the glow, the afterglow is not an
experience; and we prefer an experience."



"Epiphany is one way of attacking our temporality. Ritual is another.
Epiphany is more vulnerable to time's counter-attack than ritual. But who
would not exchange ritual for epiphany? Or so I used to think."



Is it better to exist after the revelation of the eternal? That way we can know that what we seek is already revealed. Or is it better to long for the infinite to burst through? What happens if the infinite comes and the world goes on in time? (Mount Sinai, Jesus)


We have to make ritual, we have to appeal to tradition. But when tradition makes the claim that it proceeds from the source without any shadowing of the original, one can either accept the account with something like faith, or one can say, as I am want, "that is outrageous."




But if you practice Nietzschian rigor how can you ever learn the "old paths"? Don't you have to have a measure of faith in the ridiculous?

Okay... enough of all this for the day. I am going to watch a movie, make cookies (as long as the power stays on) and eat lots of them. These are times when the body is a welcome relief to the mind.