Good Friday in August
“If you release this man, you are no friend of the emperor. Everyone who claims to be a king sets himself against the emperor……. we have no king except the emperor.”
When we claim we have no king except the emperor, we claim we have no sovereign birthright, no power to bring about change, no resistance to the virus of hatred.
We claim we have no internal divine spirit as Jesus did and as we all do.
And when we claim to have no internal divinity, we are a slave to the violence others would press upon us, and worse, it would press on those less able to resist it.
Listen to the story again.
Watch Jesus.
Watch the crowd.
Listen to their truth.
And figure out what side you want to be on. Because there are only two sides to choose.
The side of the angels.
Or the side of The Empire.
You have to serve somebody.
Who are you going to serve?
If you are out walking - a meditation for you
‘Low Angle Photo of Trees, by Stanislav Kondratiev
David Whyte: ‘Sometimes’
Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,
who could cross
a shimmering bed of leaves
without a sound,
you come to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests,
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you,
questions
that have no right
to go away.
If you would like further understanding the crowd. . .
Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
“Drowning people
Sometimes die
Fighting their rescuers.”
When apparent stability disintegrates,
As it must —
God is Change —
People tend to give in
To fear and depression,
To need and greed.
When no influence is strong enough
To unify people
They divide.
They struggle,
One against one,
Group against group,
For survival, position, power.
They remember old hates and generate new ones,
They create chaos and nurture it.
They kill and kill and kill,
Until they are exhausted and destroyed,
Until they are conquered by outside forces,
Or until one of them becomes
A leader
Most will follow,
Or a tyrant
Most fear.Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents
‘Fool’s Cap Map of the World’ (1580 - 1590) Cosmigraphs, by Michael Benson
Our Slippery Grasp of Truth, from Brain Pickings
“Truth always rests with the minority … because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion,” Kierkegaard wrote in his journal in the middle of the nineteenth century as he tussled with the eternal question of why we conform. Around the same time, across the Atlantic, Emerson fumed in his own diary as he contemplated the supreme existential challenge of individual integrity in a mass society. “Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence… I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.”