Thoughts on a Sunday (from Aug. 18)
In church today the sermon was about worshipping with a clean heart. Tony said, “If you’ve got something standing between you and your brother, take care of that before you kneel to worship.” Essentially that’s what he said, anyway, more or less, though in a few more words. This has always seemed like good advice to me, though hard to follow through on: sometimes it’s hard to know exactly HOW to get the heart clean. Aside from Lipitor, I mean. And, importantly, worship—of any sort—seems a lot more meaningful to me if I can figure out how to do it with a clear heart as well. Lately things have been so misty, confusing, and distracted. Which is part of the reason that church has been so difficult to me these days—I don’t get much out of it because I’m stuck a long ways behind this cloudiness.
Anyway, the message made sense, and I’ve been feeling lately that there are some people that I need to get clean with. (And, in some cases: get clean of. But that’ll be a story for another day.) So, after hearing the message I decided, perhaps somewhat impulsively, to make an attempt to get clear with someone I owe an apology to. This turned out to be a bad idea. A bad, bad idea. Which didn’t really surprise me, to be honest. I mean, that’s the hard part about trying to reach clarity with other people: you have to both be in the same place at the same time. I had hoped she would be in a place to hear my apology, for whatever it’s worth, but obviously she wasn’t. So I’m stuck here feeling a bit sad, still, that there’s no opportunity to close things with some finality, no reaching of some kind of agreement (in a larger sense than some superficial shaking of hands) about what happened. Still, I guess, I know that the small step I took today—the effort to make right—was a right thing to do.
In other, unrelated news:
Saturday produced a sweet, sweet August afternoon. Later in the evening my neighbors informed me that the power’d been out for two hours, but I didn’t notice at all. During that time I’d been reading by the light of a heart-cracking thunderstorm, a storm that was both heavy and light at the same time, a storm that sent sharp, deep booming waves across the sky a quarter-mile overhead. A storm that filled me with life and left me melancholy, left me feeling the full breadth and width and depth of our existence, left me feeling small. I understand, now, why the Greeks attributed thunder to the highest of their gods: I can think of no moment in my life that has filled me with sublime awe more than Saturday’s symphony.
In still other, more-or-less unrelated news:Mankind exists on the very outer crust of this plant. How many percent of the earth’s mass do we impact, with all of our mining and bombing and pillaging? The world’s deepest mine is 3902 m deep (or it will be by 2012), yet the earth’s diameter is about 12,700 km. Matching up the decimals for greater effect, we’ve got 3900 vs. 12700000. Or, lopping off decimals, we’ve got roughly 4/12700. We’ve drilled, in other words, less than one tenth of one percent of the way through the earth. We’re less than one tenth of one percent to the center of the world, even. Comparatively, we are only scratching the surface of our planet. [As others have since pointed out, this way of looking at things is stupid. which I realize. but we do get rather caught up in anthocentrism sometimes, is what i'm saying.]
Anyway, the message made sense, and I’ve been feeling lately that there are some people that I need to get clean with. (And, in some cases: get clean of. But that’ll be a story for another day.) So, after hearing the message I decided, perhaps somewhat impulsively, to make an attempt to get clear with someone I owe an apology to. This turned out to be a bad idea. A bad, bad idea. Which didn’t really surprise me, to be honest. I mean, that’s the hard part about trying to reach clarity with other people: you have to both be in the same place at the same time. I had hoped she would be in a place to hear my apology, for whatever it’s worth, but obviously she wasn’t. So I’m stuck here feeling a bit sad, still, that there’s no opportunity to close things with some finality, no reaching of some kind of agreement (in a larger sense than some superficial shaking of hands) about what happened. Still, I guess, I know that the small step I took today—the effort to make right—was a right thing to do.
In other, unrelated news:
Saturday produced a sweet, sweet August afternoon. Later in the evening my neighbors informed me that the power’d been out for two hours, but I didn’t notice at all. During that time I’d been reading by the light of a heart-cracking thunderstorm, a storm that was both heavy and light at the same time, a storm that sent sharp, deep booming waves across the sky a quarter-mile overhead. A storm that filled me with life and left me melancholy, left me feeling the full breadth and width and depth of our existence, left me feeling small. I understand, now, why the Greeks attributed thunder to the highest of their gods: I can think of no moment in my life that has filled me with sublime awe more than Saturday’s symphony.
In still other, more-or-less unrelated news:Mankind exists on the very outer crust of this plant. How many percent of the earth’s mass do we impact, with all of our mining and bombing and pillaging? The world’s deepest mine is 3902 m deep (or it will be by 2012), yet the earth’s diameter is about 12,700 km. Matching up the decimals for greater effect, we’ve got 3900 vs. 12700000. Or, lopping off decimals, we’ve got roughly 4/12700. We’ve drilled, in other words, less than one tenth of one percent of the way through the earth. We’re less than one tenth of one percent to the center of the world, even. Comparatively, we are only scratching the surface of our planet. [As others have since pointed out, this way of looking at things is stupid. which I realize. but we do get rather caught up in anthocentrism sometimes, is what i'm saying.]
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