for the love of God, no more

can't....grade....another....essay....

seems my shift in the auditorium this weekend was tonight as opposed to tomorrow night as i believed. no big problem - had planned on staying in mason anyway and heading to hamilton to see rhonda in the crucible tonight. now i'll just do it tomorrow. or maybe i'll go sunday afternoon. don't know yet, just know i'll be going sometime.

caught myself doing something strange lately - whenever i pass a window in my house, i find myself waving randomly. why, you might ask? i guess i like the idea that someone could be looking in and see me wave and think that i had seen them and either wave back or quickly stop looking at my window lest they be called a peeping tom.

i worry about my brain some days.

been doing a lot of thinking this week about religion, mostly because the idea on it keep crossing my proverbial threshold. starting with a reading in my buechner:

Unless you become like a child, Jesus said, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and maybe part of what that means is that in the long run what is good about religion is playing the way a child plays at being grown up until he finds that being grown up is just another way of playing and thereby starts to grow up himself. Maybe what is good about religion is playing that the Kingdom will come, until - in the joy of your playing, the hope and rhythm and comradeship and poignance and mystery of it - you start to see that the playing is itself the first-fruits of the Kingdom's coming and of God's presence within us and among us."

then tonight, through a posting on one of my mailing lists, i read an e-mail exchange between sam harris and andrew sullivan looking at the question, Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'? fascinating discussion. at some point i dismissed sullivan as someone who annoys me (probably because he's conservative), but i found his arguments, especially his most recent post, inspiring. these words in particular resonated with me:

You write: "whatever is true about us, spiritually and ethically, must be discoverable now." Yes - absolutely yes. But now is always and everywhere a function of all that we have ever been. The key contribution of religion is to grapple with that fact at a far deeper level than science, to see human life as an intersection, in Eliot's words, of the timeless with time. Religion at its deepest is the attempt to reconcile this profound human predicament: that we exist in bodies but dream beyond them, that we are caught between the irrational instinct of beasts but endowed with the serene hope of angels. This paradox of humanity - which you would erase into a clean slate - is what religion responds to and has always responded to. The genius of the religious life lived to its fullest lies, in Oakeshott's words,

"in the poetic quality, humble or magnificent, of the images,

the rites, the observances, and the offerings

(the wisp of wheat on the wayside calvary)

in which it recalls to us that

'eternity is in love with the productions of time'
and invites us to live 'so far as is possible' as an immortal."

seems appropriate to be pondering these ideas as we move into the most "religious" of christian seasons, lent. the rites and observances of this season echo blake's verse: "eternity is in love with the productions of time." much of what we do during this time seems strange - the sacrifice, the rituals. but it's our attempt to make sense of this mystery, to play until we become, to try and align our mortal lives with the Immortal.

hard to believe i lived more than half my life unaware of the season's significance.

recommendation: you should be listening to woxy vintage. now. best collection around. turn off your ipod and turn this on: http://woxy.lala.com/vintage/ like shedding 20 years of worthless music.

night. Æ

Tunes: poi dog pondering - spending the day in the shirt that you wore