Random Thoughts

It’s been three weeks since I last wrote here – too long. But where has the time gone? Church has been busy with community work (including working with those working on flood recovery), new projects, meetings, and most recently a two-day youth trip to Feed My Starving Children and Valley Fair. Life has been busy with family – helping both our older children move furniture, a pleasant visit from my sister and brother who live out of state, coping with difficult news about our granddaughter Isabelle who is not developing as expected.

So here it is, mid-July, and the North Central Jurisdictional Conference is this coming week. I want and need to write something before three more weeks pass by. Since visiting the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville in March, I have been listening to a fair amount of music from this genre – Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, Ernest Tubb, Ray Price, and so on. What about writing about my visit to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum occurring just weeks before I attended my first opera – La Traviata? Great idea – except the more I thought about it, the more familiar it seemed. Sure enough, I already wrote about that in April. I have also listened to some opera music since that time, including Luciano Pavarotti in La Traviata. I remain captivated by Natalie Dessay’s performance of the lead female role in La Traviata.

So my mind has been wandering a bit, trying to grab hold of something to write about. The best I can do for now is share some interesting quotes encountered along the way in recent weeks.

The approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.
Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, 56

In poetry, wonder is coupled with the joy of speech.
Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie, 3

What is psychoanalysis if not an infinite quest for rebirths through the experience of love.
Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, 1

The ideal critique of a faith must always be whether it embodies within itself the fundamental contradictions of the human paradox and yet is able to support them without fanaticism, sadism, and narcissism, but with openness and trust. Religion itself is an ideal of strength and of potential for growth, of what man might become by assuming the burden of his life, as well as by being partly relieved by it.
Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning, 198

With Faith and With Feathers,

David