Peter’s letter of Hope

1:3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, 5who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 6In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, 7so that the genuineness of your faith—being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed. 8Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, 9for you are receiving the telos of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

Hope - the occassional delights which point to more are not wrong; but they point beyond. Satisfaction in this world is inherently limited, even when we are doing what we should. HOPE gives the confidence to believe and do the right things even though there is still a satisfaction gap.

Imperishable - everything seems to change and exhibit the threat of degradation and the inescapability of impermanence. Buddha resigned to this and built his response to life on it. Christ's HOPE, the resurrection into the permanent/imperishable changes everything!

Telos faith: saved soul - the belief/faith in Christ is that his resurrection shows the entrance into the imperishable; the lasting; abiding. My soul does not have to inevitably degenerate like brittle bones and unreliable organs, it can and should grow in grace and wisdom with confidence of now and future satisfaction.

today: Lord help me to see the changing nature of my world and life as a sobering call to invest wisely in what will last.

Being and Becoming (response to e-mail)

My core view (right now) is more or less as follows.

1. There is something; not nothing (reality is real – unlike Hinduism etc.).
2. This something (world, etc.) includes me, a self-aware being.
3. As a self-aware being I have personhood and relate to other persons.
a. Personhood is that self-awareness that includes options of choice and the history of choices
4. Personhood has a source, and it would seem to be in greater personhood, not in non-personhood (personhood from matter/energy would seem to be necessarily deterministic and not personhood as we experience it. If we were just delusional in perceiving choice even though it doesn’t exist, then even my ponderings are determined and the discussion is moot).
5. The “I AM” of Israel is the most compelling candidate for this source of my personhood.
6. Jesus as the Messiah who is the “I AM” and serves the “I AM” resonates as the most complete explanation of the source (and at another level, the compelling question of unity AND diversity).
7. Therefore I follow Jesus the Messiah as my way of being loyal to my source of being and I try to become what I should become by exerting choice based on wisdom derived from humility based diligence.

Music

Friend: What does music do for you? How is it helpful, and how is it dangerous? I've gone through a cycle where I have expected a lot from music, but now I wonder whether I've been asking more of it than it was intended for.

TelosX: Music teases me that satisfaction of connection is possible.

My main intake of music is yahoo radio. It adapts to my ratings of songs and tries to guess what I might like. It introduced me to the Yoshida Brothers (Japanese techno with traditional instruments) and a variety of folksters. All tease, some better than others, but all they can do is stir hope; not deliver the telos of it.

The issue you might be talking about is the iPod syndrome of despair (no, that is not a real thing, I'm just trying to think). You capture a couple thousand songs, many of which inspired at one time, and then you look at the menu and cannot for the life of you find a song to play; and you wonder why.

Part of the problem is the closed loop. …me-music-me... That is why I like the radio; it comes from without and surprises me. Not always for good. I just had Manheim Steam Roller playing Frosty the Snowman. I hit the 'never play this again' button. Led Zeppelin live "Going to California" is playing instead. A hippie/rock song I remember from my teen years. I would never choose it on my own, but it is making me think from angles that surprise me. Most recently I caught a documentary about Haight/Asbury hippies and the summer of love. A small group of people moved toward communal love and peace and psychedelic freedom. It seemed so pure and wise, until the masses came. Thugs, drifters, gawkers, young runaways. It imploded. And the summer of peace ended.

So, as I listen to this song, Robert Plant sings about a girl with flowers in her hair… and then comments to the audience "I don't see them anymore" and gets back to his song. All of this happens as I am typing to you and I realize that music stirs the clutter of my soul and mind, occasionally prompting my feeling of being alive to surpass my awareness of my feeling of being alive; but not so often.

The aching problem of life is being stuck between the meaninglessness feelings related to the mundane and the irritated feelings of listening to grandiose verbiage from idealism speech/text. I guess that is where poetry sneaks in between and reminds us, we have an unmet desire. This is not all there is and we must press on. One day, Lord willing, what music hints at will be and will abide.

Gotta go. 'Cat Power' is singing aboutdreams and adulthood…… Colors and the Kids…

"It must be the kids and the colors that keep me alive… because the music is boring me to death… on this January night…"