Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Showing posts with label Counseling - Personal Identity Crisis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Counseling - Personal Identity Crisis. Show all posts

Monday, March 4, 2024

Thomas Jay Oord - Barbie and Our Purpose

 


Barbie Main Trailer
by Warner Bros. Pictures
May 25, 2023



Billie Eilish - What Was I Made For? 
(Official Music Video)




* * * * * * * *


Barbie and Our Purpose

by Thomas Jay Oord
February 25th, 2024


Tripp Fuller and I have written a book called God After Deconstruction. It will be available in April 2024.

Among the issues we discuss is how to think about purpose after the traditional God is deconstructed. Here’s an excerpt from the book, which builds on the Barbie movie.

What Was I Made For?

In the blockbuster movie Barbie, we find the world-renown doll and diverse friends in roles their maker has chosen. The toys dance and sing, party, and live according to the determinations of their manufacturer, Mattel.

In a moment of questioning, however, Barbie ponders life beyond what has been decided for her. She wonders what the real world might be like. So she visits Weird Barbie and is presented with a choice: go “back to the way your life was” or “know the truth about the universe.”

At first, Barbie chooses what’s safe and familiar: Barbie Land. “I’m not Adventure Barbie,” she explains, “I’m Stereotypical Barbie.”

With a little coaxing, she opts to learn the truth. So she departs Barbie Land for an adventure. To her delight, Barbie finds the real world thrilling; her newfound autonomy gives joy. But this liberation raises questions about who she is, the customs of her past, and the desires of her friends, especially Ken. Barbie realizes that the restrictions of the status quo, especially patriarchy, cause harm.

Near the end of the movie, Barbie talks with corporate leaders at Mattel. In a conversation with a CEO, Barbie admits to being confused: “I’m not really sure where I belong anymore.” Billie Eilish expresses this angst beautifully in the Grammy Award-winning song written for the movie: “What Was I Made For?”

Barbie then interacts with Ruth, the woman who originally imagined her as a doll for her daughter. “I want to be part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that’s made,” Barbie says, “I want to be the one imagining, not the idea itself.”

“You don’t need my permission,” Ruth replies.

“But you’re The Creator,” says Barbie. “You control me.”

“Ha!” says Ruth. “I can’t control you any more than I could control my own daughter!”

God’s Role in Purpose and Meaning

After the God of traditional theology is deconstructed, questions arise: What is our purpose? Does life have meaning? What’s the point?

The God of traditional theology is like the patriarchy at Mattel… but even more controlling. This deity predetermines the actions of all, so we’re dolls playing predestined roles. Rather than agents with autonomy, we dance and sing, enjoy and suffer, bleed and die according to our Maker’s will.

When God is imagined as one who foreordains and/or foreknows, questions about purpose and meaning have simple answers. Life’s purpose is whatever God determines, and it means whatever God decides. When God is in control, it all makes sense…

at least at first.

Like Barbie, however, we who deconstruct begin to imagine life outside systems that confine us. We realize we make free actual choices, and our lives matter. So we embark on an adventure to discover a world beyond what’s expected. We grow.

Once we — like Barbie — recognize our autonomy, it becomes difficult to imagine a controlling God. When we suffer needlessly or encounter evil in the world, we begin to doubt God has a pre-selected blueprint. Unjust systems make us wonder about an omnipotent God’s purposes; pointless pain causes us to question whether life has ultimate meaning. We encounter the restrictions of controlling systems and the restricting gods required to manage them.

The Barbie movie answers these questions by saying the purpose of life is in the living of it. The movie’s last moments show Barbie imagining experiences of various types. The message seems to be that we find meaning in whatever happens. That has a measure of truth, but isn’t there something more?

How might we think about God, purpose, and meaning after traditional theology?

Sunday, October 31, 2021

‘The Internet Remains Undefeated’ Must Be Defeated


PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION: SAM WHITNEY; GETTY IMAGES; SECRET LAB INSTITUTE



“The internet remains undefeated” glorifies
the removal of context, nuance, and thought.


‘The Internet Remains Undefeated’ 
Must Be Defeated

by Zak Jason
September 24, 2021


The classic comment and caption has become a meme in its own right.
Harmless as it may seem, a close study reveals dark undertones.


THE BIG BOAT stuck in the Suez Canal, Oprah waving off Meghan and Harry with her “Stop it” hands, all the Teletubbies boinking one another blue as the sun baby watches approvingly, a photo bashing trans athletes shared by Donald Trump Jr. These memes are unified not only in encapsulating the lunacy of 2021, but in the four words that have consistently appeared beside them and countless others, in captions as well as comments: “The internet remains undefeated.”

Surely you’ve seen these words, but maybe you haven’t read them. (Congratulations on your sanity.) An apolitical, amoral stand-in equally for lol, and thank you, used for both schadenfreude and firgun, “The internet remains undefeated” is the internet of phrases about the internet, existing everywhere and nowhere, meaning everything and nothing. A seemingly benign expression—until you say it back.

The internet remains undefeated.
The internet remains undefeated.
The internet remains undefeated.

The more I encounter these words, the more they pierce me with mortal dread. It’s not just the rotten onion of their ambiguity: When did the internet’s winning streak begin? What, or who, is it undefeated against? Ourselves, maybe. But then why are so many of us so jubilant about reminding ourselves that we’ve defeated ourselves? And what would, could, should defeating the internet look like? But my disdain for the saying is also because of its underlying sentiment. The true terror of “The internet remains undefeated” is that it’s most often used in lighthearted contexts, yet exposes the deepest darkness of our lives online, a darkness that we’ve become either blind to or numb to.

SEARCHES ON THE term “undefeated internet” suggest that the oldest extant usage of the ghastly phrase might belong to Timothy Hall (@peoplescrtic), a film critic and meme lord from Seattle. On the morning of August 12, 2013, he posted on Instagram a meme of a scowling Russell Westbrook, the mercurial NBA dynamo, photoshopped into a character selection screen from the arcade classic Mortal Kombat, with the caption “The internet remains undefeated.” It’s a textbook usage, the kind Hall says he’s been deploying on social media and in group chats in the years since. To him, the saying epitomizes the internet as the world’s great equalizer. “You can be POTUS,” he says, “or you can be a soccer mom yelling at a game, not knowing you’re being filmed. Everyone is fair game to become a meme. Maybe it’s POTUS who makes you into a meme, or maybe it’s my 14-year-old nephew. You may not know it’s your day, you just have to ride the wave and let the internet defeat you until it’s someone else’s turn.”

But Hall can’t take credit for coining the phrase; he says he must’ve picked it up from someone on the internet along the way. “If someone ever claimed to have invented it,” he adds, “the internet would defeat them. That’s the beauty of it.”

To a wide-ranging group of social media users like Hall, “The internet remains undefeated” is, on its face, a simple expression of joy, or nostalgia for a more joyous era of the internet. Ryan Milner, a professor of internet culture at the College of Charleston and author of The World Made Meme, says the phrase harkens back to a time, between roughly 2003 and 2013, when the internet was “still kind of this other place that didn’t operate by and could maybe transcend real-world rules.” This was the heyday of early YouTube and message boards like Something Awful, 4chan, and Reddit, “when you saw a flurry of subcultural activity and content creation that became kind of a tone setter for people who are still extremely online.” So in 2021, people comment “The internet remains undefeated” to a flourishing of memes about Bernie Sanders and his mittens or the discord between your fall plans and the Delta variant, because it recalls when life online seemed less about livestreamed mass murders and the algorithmically driven death of democracy and more about rickrolling and lolcats. At the surface level, says Milner, the phrase “is a way to kind of appreciate when the early spirit of collective creativity online resurfaces.”

People also use the phrase, Milner adds, as a way of “reacting to the randomness of what they encounter online.” Every piece of content “is made by a real person at the other end of the tubes. But we just see the funny picture. So instead of saying ‘Tim from Madison, Wisconsin, remains undefeated,’ we tend to collapse everything from everyone as being from ‘the internet,’ as if it’s this singular mystical being.” In that sense, the saying is a collectivist antivenom to unhinged individualism online.

“The internet remains undefeated” glorifies the removal of context, nuance, and thought.

But exuberant and egalitarian as the expression may appear, its undertones are much darker. For one thing, “The internet remains undefeated” is also a symptom of what Milner and fellow internet culture scholar Whitney Phillips call fetishistic flattening. This is the tendency for internet users to fixate on a meme or tweet itself, and not consider how or why it was created, the backstory of who or what’s being depicted and shared, or who may be harmed in the process. (The “Hide your kids, hide your wife” song, which belittles the man in the original clip, and deepfaked drunk Nancy Pelosi are all standard examples of fetishization.) In this way, “The internet remains undefeated” glorifies the removal of context, nuance, and thought. “Undefeated” in particular also captures how on social media, context is subsumed by combativeness. Beneath the surface, says Milner, the phrase is often “antagonistic and barbed,” and of “an atmosphere where how funny you are about what you produce and say, and how many people respond no matter what you say, is seen as a competition.”

Of course, context removal and ruthless competitiveness are embedded in dozens of other popular memes and replies to memes: Distracted Boyfriend, Galaxy Brain, Swole Doge vs. Meek Doge, so and so “woke up and chose violence.” But whereas those all celebrate the defeat of a single common enemy or idea lampooned in the meme itself, what makes “The internet remains undefeated” so deflating is that it celebrates our own collective defeat of ourselves. The internet’s unstated, vanquished opponent is us, the users who both consume and are the butts of the memes that phrase is often a response to. But deep down we all understand that we are also the internet, as the ones who populate it, generate its content, and created it in the first place. As Jeffrey Bloechl, a philosophy professor and phenomenologist at Boston College, told me, any problems that appear on the internet “can be traced back to things we human beings either did or failed to do when we made the thing.” After all, he adds, humans designed the internet to be boundless. “If the internet, strictly as internet, is fundamentally mathematical, it cannot itself be the source of any limits.” By that logic, “there is no way not to wonder whether in unleashing a power that is undefeated,” one that can transcend the limits of our own bodies and minds, we’ve also unleashed “a power to change what we are,” a power to defeat the human condition.

That is the horrifying economy of Those Four Words: There is no more haunting a distillation of the unstoppable seepage of technology into every fabric of our being than “The internet remains undefeated.” These words are a glaring reminder that the internet, of which I am a part, is defeating me. That in the moment I am reading them, I am devoting my attention not to my wife, infant daughter, friends, family, colleagues, wind rattling the window pane, or my breathing, but to what faceless strangers are saying about Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friends’ balls, and to what quippy things I should be saying to faceless strangers about Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friends balls. That gif of the Teletubbies having tantric sex? It exists only in my smooth, broken brain, a brain the internet broke so that I think in the way the internet wants me to think.

THE SUBTEXT OF “The internet remains undefeated” is a vaguely Zen koan: “We remain undefeated against ourselves.” Yes, it speaks to humanity’s ability to harness the internet to conquer individuals with collective humor. But it also speaks to how we’ve been harnessed by the internet’s power—a power we bestowed— and feel powerless to do anything about. Saying those four words only seems to perpetuate that unfortunate reality.

But recognizing this can also be a first step in taking power back. It’s telling that we often use these words in the silliest of circumstances—that even when we can all seem to set aside our many polarized differences and come together to laugh about someone hiding a testicle-swelling STD with fake symptoms of the Covid vaccine, someone still says “The internet remains undefeated” as a reminder that we are constantly fraying our humanity online. In that sense, the act of saying that “the internet remains undefeated” is an act of condemning what the saying itself celebrates. A human typed those words, words that can attune fellow humans to just how very online we are, but can also remind us that we have a choice. We can either fall right back into the unthinking slipstream and let the internet remain undefeated, or take our raised awareness and step away.

---

Zak Jason runs WIRED's research team, overseeing the fact-checking of stories for print, web, and video. He also edits WIRED's op-eds. He has written about everything from terrorism to Kidz Bop for the New York Times Magazine, Slate, and The Guardian. Before WIRED, he was a writer and fact-checker for... Read more


Thursday, December 10, 2020

Peter Rollins - The Price of Happiness




It’s very easy for us to question the possibility of experiencing a lasting happiness.

Can we really find it?

Is it something that we can hold onto for prolonged periods of time?

The answer is likely ‘yes’. Indeed there are many who have dedicated their entire lives to cultivating it, even creating retreats and seminars designed to help others realize it.

However, in psychoanalysis there is a price to pay for happiness: the fundamental compromise of your desire. The more that happiness pervades ones life, the more that individual becomes estranged from their unspeakable passion.

In this way, people like Zizek refer to happiness as the category of the fool. It is the pursuit undertaken by one who would rather avoid confronting the contradictions and antagonisms that lie within them. Contenting themselves instead with a peace that is opposed to chaos, rather than a peace that is hard won via tarrying the chaos.

In this pop-up seminar I’ll be exploring the chasm that lies between happiness and desire via reference to an ancient Jewish parable and the Lacanian notion of the barred subject.


Against Happiness
by Peter Rollins
Streamed live on Dec 8, 2020


Comment: Peter. I was wondering if you could do a talk on the damage done to mental health of kids, and still when these kids are adults, by extreme fundamentalists, especially Calvinists. Here in Northern Ireland it would be churches like Free Presbyterians, Independent Methodists, Reformed Baptists, Brethren. I had to attend a Free P school and I, and others, are still mentally affected. My father was moderator of the Free P church, so I have significant inside knowledge if you need details privately. There are a huge number of people struggling as as a result of their upbringing. Many thanks.


* * * * * * *

Wikipedia - The Graph of Desire

Lacan devised numerous quasi-mathematical diagrams to represent the structure of the unconscious and its points of contact with empirical and mental reality. He adapted figures from the field of topology in order to represent the Freudian view of the mind as embodying a 'double inscription' (which could be defined as the ultimate inseparability of unconscious motivations from conscious ones).

Graph

The graph of desire was first proposed in a 1960 colloquium, and was later published in the Ecrits. It depends on ideas developed originally in Lacan's Schema R, a graph in which fundamental organising structures of the human mind are shown in a schematic relationship to the domains or 'orders' which in turn structure human reality: the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real.

The graph of desire is a 'flattened' representation of a signifying chain as it crosses a pathway Lacan called a vector of desire. It appears as two curved lines which cross one another at two separate points. Each line has a symbolic meaning.

Elements of the graph

The signifying chain begins in a linguistic sign (S) and progresses to a signification (S'), or a linguistic meaning. It can be expressed sententially and has a duration.

The vector of desire is a representation of the volition and will of the split or barred subject ($). Unlike the signifying chain, the vector of desire is expressed metaphorically, and has no duration.

It is necessary to bear in mind the special conception of the subject Lacan means by the $ symbol. The barred subject is the internally conflicted result of the processes of individuation that begin in infancy. In Lacan's account of individuation, the infant must respond to the loss of symbiosis with the mother by creating a symbol of this lack. In doing so the infant is constrained by the always-already present structures of a natural language. There is a certain relief in the summoning of a symbolically present 'mother', but the experience of the mother who returns to the infant as someone-signified-by-the-word-'mother' is nevertheless one of absolute, irremediable loss. Mother — and the world — is now mediated by the Symbolic order and the exigencies of language.

With this in mind, the crossing of the two pathways in the graph of desire can be understood to connote interference and constraint. Desire for the primordial object is not fulfilled except through the constraints of the signifying chain. The vector of desire is metaphorical, substituting various objects for the absolutely lost primordial one, and irrupting into language without regard for the passage of time, or for the particular human relationship through which the vector moves.

Finally, the points at which the vector of desire and the signifying chain cross can be seen as instances of Freudian double inscription. The 'conscious and unconscious' significance of an act or utterance are one and the same, and each constrains the other.


* * * * * * *

Lacanian Graph of Desire

Lacan developed his graph of desire in four stages – you find them below. The graphs and the theory behind it can be found in the 1960 essay “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious.”


In: Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W.Norton &Company, 2006), p. 435.









See also:


Free Ebook - 



* * * * * * *


Happiness and Desire by Peter Rollins
or, the Meaningfulness of Opposition and Contradiction

Abridged Notes by R.E. Slater
December 10, 2020

Optimized Therapies help one become happy whereas Productive Maladaptation Psychoanalysis confronts the contradictions of one’s self whereby one may (mal)adapt to find a less conflicted sense of purpose, meaning, contentment again.

Pete tells of a Jewish Parable to help explain The Elemental Signifier "S" in the Graph of Desire by Jacques Lacan:

In the parable God interrupts two rabbis who have been arguing about a subject for twenty years. Growing weary of the conflict God goes to tell them what the topic of their division means but as soon as God introduces Himself the two rabbis ask God to bugger off so that they may continue arguing about their differences.

What is the meaning of this Jewish parable? First, God is the incoming of happiness which neither want. They want the struggle to discover who they are, not the answer to their difference. Second, the rabbis represent the Torah which presents the interpretive struggle of their context. Without the struggle there can be no discovered meaning which might significantly change their being. And lastly, the removal of God’s Self from the argument is the pleasure of God in allowing freewill beings to gather meaning in order to garner resolve and productive movement into and through their lives.

In Lacanian terms we would deconstruct our idea of happiness against our desire for happiness knowing that it is in the contradiction to happiness that we might find in the struggle of one’s self "that which we are and which we want."

In religious terms God is the One who brings wholeness and peace into our lives. Conversely, the Torah is seen to represent the signifying chain which are a set of meanings or words which convey a form of communication between one to the other. But not exactly in the same ideations but in close approximation of meaningful ideations. (Cf. Signifying chain by Jacques Lacan. Also see, Lacanianism in Wikipedia)

Along this signifying chain, or line of personal meaning, is the process of discovery where we start at one place and end up at another. However, without the process of discovery, of struggle, of opposition, there can be no meaningful or significant “end” of discussion, or change of being, should the process be denied, interrupted, or mediated in less oppositional terms.

It also can mean that once we arrive at a meaningful discovery or deconstruction point in our lives, then by looking back on our past, or on some aspect of meaning we had held as significant, that all those self-placement points of meaning will have now shifted to become either more meaningful or less meaningful in the personal reconstruction process. It is in this way which Lacan is seen in post-structural terms of postmodernism.

Hence, the signifying chain of one’s being is both a process moment of forward activity as well as a retroactive moment of letting go of the past process that was becoming us. Though Pete doesn’t say this, Lacan has identified what the Process Logician Alfred North Whitehead would call a very process moment of “being and becoming.” (Cf. Process and Reality by Whitehead)

.

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Addendum

While listening to Pete's discussion to the vain pursuit of happiness I thought I might twist it a bit to show how Lacan may easily fit in with Whitehead's philosophy of process. As an integral theory, Whiteheadian thought is by its nature inclusive to any and all parts of academic and biblical discussions. No longer may other 'isms rule such as Plato or Neo-Platonism nor any biblical theologies based upon Hellenised Platonisms (or Scholasticisms, or Modernisms). Process thought is best expressed through postmodern post-structuralism and should continue to be an integrating force far beyond the 21st Century. But it was first best expressed in postmodernism. And so, while we struggle with fear and uncertainty, we must also know that in the bible, in Israelite societies and all societies coming after them, that fear and uncertainty is a constant in human survival. Process thought says to allow it be, learn from it, and build better societies from there. In biblical terms this means we replace fear of life with trust in God's presence in our lives. That we replace division of society because of uncertainty to trust with one another to work together towards a better unity. And that at the last, having gone through common struggles of survival with one another we might also have formed tighter bonds of fidelity and wellbeing with one another. It is vain to pursue happiness when in the very pursuit we deny to ourselves the process of being and becoming which is the very thing we are attempting to artificially create but cannot against the reality of disallowing deconstruction, contradiction, and opposition to shape us towards a more meaning personal identity held with the bounds of societal togetherness. - res


Monday, February 1, 2016

Being Loved - "Things Someone Who Loved You Should Have Told You"


Things Someone Who Loved You Should Have Told You
http://johnpavlovitz.com/2016/02/01/things-someone-who-loved-you-should-have-told-you/

by John Pavlovitz
February 1, 2016

Words can do incredible damage, but they can’t hold a candle to silence.

Often it is those words that have been withheld which leave the greatest scars upon us. It is in that terrible absence that we are dealt the harshest blow by those who claim to love us.

Somewhere along the line you were denied something you needed to live; something destination-altering and hope-giving that you deserved.

At some point on your path, someone should have encouraged you, but refrained.
  • They should have defended you, but did not.
  • They should have released you, but chose not to.
  • They should have said something—instead of nothing.
Someone should have told you that you were beautiful far beneath the surface, so that you didn’t grow up believing that you were defined by your waistline or by the scale or by the affection of someone else who may have cared far too little for you.

Someone should have told you that you were more than your worst mistake, so that you weren’t still imprisoned there in the spot of that momentary failure so long after it; still stuck trying to undo something that could never be undone and believing it made you less than.


Someone should have told you that God was not angry with you, so that your faith was allowed safe passage to grow and fearlessly move toward the One who made you and adores you without caveat or condition; the One who delights in you as you are.

Someone should have told you that it wasn’t your fault, so that you were relieved of the wasteful, crushing burden of what you were never meant to carry or deserve to still be saddled with; all the guilt and regret that unfairly declare you culpable.

Someone should have told you that you were a bona-fide, freakin’ miracle; a once in history collection of atoms and color and sound, so that you never doubted for a second your inherent worth, and the beautiful mark you’ve made in the places where your feet have landed.

Someone should have told you that you were forgiven, so that you didn’t cling to a vicious grudge against yourself which pronounced you dirty; so you were not tried for the same crime again and again in the court of your own head.


Someone should have told you that your sadness wasn’t a sickness, so you could have allowed yourself to grieve fully; to feel and speak the depth and breadth of your pain, instead of daily burying it beneath a brittle facade of okayness and pretending you weren’t devastated.

Someone should have told you that your best was good enough; that the honest desires of your heart and the diligent work of your hands regardless of the results, made your efforts successful. If they had, you may not have felt failure in anything less than perfection.

Someone should have told you that you were not what people said you were. That might have emancipated you from the expectations of a million voices judging you from a distance, which you believed as gospel. You might have found your identity independent of the shouts from the crowd or the cutting words of the critics.

Someone should have told you that you were loved as you were; not because of anything you did or won or achieved or made, but simply because you were lovable. It may have saved you from so restlessly striving to earn what you already deserved.

I can’t undo the brutal omissions you endured in the past, or the time you’ve squandered or the peace you’ve surrendered as a result.

I can only give you these words now, as a firm and steady spot to plant your foot and pivot as you begin again down another road, one with far fewer demons hiding in the shadows to ambush you.

So stop to listen to the whisper in your ear, that breaks the long and heavy silence and says that you are free. Feel the lightness that only love brings.

Somewhere along the road someone close to you should have told you all this, but they didn’t.

So I am telling you.

Be encouraged.

- JP


http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/loved_2.html


Friday, June 14, 2013

Meg Jay, "Why 30 Is Not the New 20"

 
 
In her book "The Defining Decade," Meg Jay suggests that many
twentysomethings feel trivialized during what is actually the most
transformative - and defining - period of our adult lives."
 
 
 
Meg Jay: Why 30 is not the new 20
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Claim Your Adulthood
 
Identity Capital overcomes Identity Crisis
 
Weak Ties break old, static bonds
 
Act Now on picking your family
 
Be Intentional with your time and relationships