Fierce Chaos

"But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and blood of this fierce chaos! how the world, as from a resurrection, balancing itself on the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has resumed its yet unwearied flight into the Heaven of time. Listen to the music, unheard by outward ears, which is as a ceaseless and invisible wind, nourishing its everlasting cause with strength and witness." -Percy Shelley

Light Pollution

This morning, on NPR's Perspectives segment, I heard about "light pollution." Think of it... the notion of polluting the night skies with light to the point where there will no longer be any spaces of depth or darkness, no reprieve for the eyes. The fireflies will no longer fly, frogs won't mate discerningly (what does that mean?), and we won't be able to discern what is lightness anymore. How do we distinguish star from star? Everywhere, there are citylights. From beneath the ocean up to the stars, we would pollute ourselves with lights, with lightness, with lamps and posts and bright bulbs pointed towards the heavens. What would it be like to surrounded by such an absence of deep, rich black? So much lightness that it would hurt...

Modotti Seeing

Saturday, Sep. 16th. Visited the SF MOMA to view the Tina Modotti and Edward Weston exhibit. She photographs, among other things, telephone wires and telegraph wires stretched on poles. He photographs images of her self, studies in nude. She shows workers carrying hay and straw on their backs, concrete ladened on their spines, women with various items on their shoulders, heads, backs. She sees a small boy squatting in the dry heat, women laundering clothes on rocks, women kneeling outside a church. She sees roses, up close and wiltering, heady, subtle but aromatic. She sees...

Vietnam thoi xua

Hom qua, HA gap mot nguoi sinh vien dang hoc o trong CDSP. Nguoi nay la mot Giao Su cua Community College, sap sua ra truong vao thang 05 voi bang M.Div. Ba ta noi rang hoi xua, cha me la Giao Si o Viet Nam, theo hoi Seventh Day Adventist. Ho sinh song o VN 10 nam. Nghe noi vay, long cam thay hoi ghen ghen, vi lam sao ma mot nguoi My da trang, mot nguoi My goc Chau Au lai sinh song o nuoc cua minh lau hon minh? HA thi duoc sinh ra tai Saigon, nhung da lia VN khi 6 tuoi. Le ra, do la nuoc cua minh, la dan minh. Nhung day la mot gia dinh euro-American sang qua VN, de "cuu vot" nhung con nguoi VN... sao thay that la imperialist... giong nhu la mot cultural domination alongside mot religious domination which is labeled as "salvation."

Ba ta noi, khi song o VN (khoang late 1940s to early 1950s) gia dinh ho chi co tiep suc voi nguoi My thoi, voi nhung nguoi My o LXQ, va su tiep suc voi "dan Viet" chi qua su truyen giao, de "giai cuu" nhung tam hon cua nguoi Viet. Nghi den, thi tuc lam, va buon lam... vi rat nhieu nhieu van con cach suy nghi do... ho nghi ho phai convert and save the locals. White missionaries, they have shaped so much of our world, but to what end??

Richter, Isaiah, & Absolution of Sins

Yesterday, there was an earthquake in the East Bay area which measured 3.4 on the Richter scale (this I didn't know until an hour later when someone emailed to the faculty a section of an online news article from the San Francisco Chronicle). We felt the tremor while sitting in chapel for Ash Wednesday, during the reading of Isaiah, waiting for the absolution of all our sins. The meaning would be lost on many people, but some will realize the irony and significance of such a "coincidence."

At lunch in the refectory today, I sat next to a few CDSP seminarians debating the question of whether or not it is possible for an individual to be bound to hell by another individual(s) and/or a community. One bearded fellow remarked that yes, but not entirely, and no, but not entirely. A certain pale-skinned, blond-haired woman offered the hypothetical situation: what if a man were so hard-pressed that he is eventually "led" to stealing bread for his children; she posed the question, isn't that a condition of being "forced" into sinning by a certain individual or community or circumstance? Another short-haired woman--a cheerful, robust one with a very positive outlook on life--countered that one would have to (re)define "sinning" and "sin" in order to examine that particular context fully; because, how could such a situation be considered sinning, she asked? Would we not have to look at the rules for necessity of survival, she wondered. The cheerful one, she believes that it is entirely internal and that one's decision to turn to God depends entirely on one's self.

Relational beings. Aren't we formed by the communities (or lack thereof) that surround us? No one self could be formed sans the influence of some structure that in one way or another effects our understanding of God. We aren't so independent as we'd like to think. Our human frailty inhabits us and those weaknesses allow us to be tempted, swayed, persuaded by our surroundings. It's about our continuous efforts to turn towards God, to meet God, even though we are weak.