It occurs to me…

Internet hopping in financial news and commentary recently I came across both a “buy” and a “sell” recommendation for a given stock recently issued by two different experts on the same day.  It caused me to chuckle, but only briefly, as it was followed by the thought, well, the reality, that like these guys, 1) no matter how much I think I know about something, there are and will always be differing takes, and 2) no matter how much I think I know about something there’s a WHOLE LOT MORE I don’t know.  Songwriter/musicians, in this sense, seem to be much wiser (or at least less sure of things) than financial experts:

The Avett Brothers’, in Smithsonian, admit: “Turns out we don’t get to know everything.”

And then there’s Iris Dement’s Let the Mystery Be:

“Everybody is wondering why and where they all came from

Everybody is worried ‘bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done

But no one knows for certain, and so it’s all the same to me

I think I’ll just, let the mystery be.”

When in doubt, stick with the songwriter/musicians, at least the good ones.

Photo taken recently in downtown Austin

Revisiting the prodigal son parable (Luke 15:11-32) always reminds me of the richness of the story and the underlying lessons that it holds.  What comes to mind on this reading is the phrase “what have you done for me lately?”  If asked of the younger son by the father, the honest answer would seemingly be: “While causing you angst I have taken half of your hard-earned belongings, sold, lost, or thrown them around in ‘riotous living.’”  If asked of the younger brother by the older brother, the honest answer would seemingly be: “Not a damn thing.  I’ve been out having fun running through my inheritance.”  Yet those responses draw wildly dissimilar reactions.  One gets the sense that the father will never hold the younger son’s transgressions against him, while the older brother always will.

All of which goes to show just how important perspective and attitude are.

Photo taken recently on the back porch

“Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.”  Antisthenes

So, doesn’t that in some odd way make your enemies your friends?  That is, I guess, the sentiment from another quote, one of my favorites, from Oscar Wilde: “True friends stab you in the front.”

All that to say what I guess is generally known – separating friends from enemies is tricky business, and requires occasional reconsideration.

Photo taken on the California coast last year when travel was actually a thing.

Binary thinking is going to be the ruination of the world as we know it — either that, or its not.

 

 

Watching a video last night of John Lewis’ body being taken one last time across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I thought of the Shakespeare quote from Julius Ceasar – “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”  While that may often be the case, Bill, I gotta call “bullshit” on this one when it comes to John Lewis.  One of the original Freedom Fighters, Lewis was on the Bloody Sunday march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, and returned often on the March 7 anniversary to make the march again – only in the return crossings he was not beaten and bloodied by Alabama state troopers.  On that Lewis noted: “Some of us gave a little blood for the right to participate in the democratic process.

Lewis’ legacy in the  civil rights movement, and later as the “Conscience of Congress” will not be “interred with [his] bones,” and shame on us if we allow it to be.

I pick up and reread C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity now and again and I am (shouldn’t be by now) often surprised by how it feels so contemporary.  But of course, that is how reading about  universal truths should feel.

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper.  Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out.  Is one’s feeling ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quire so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible?”

There’s a lot of that going around some fifty years after Lewis wrote it.  That is, essentially, the essence of schadenfreude – bad joy.  But it gets worse (and feels more uncomfortable) as Lewis continues:

“If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils.  You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker.  If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see gray as black, and then to see white itself as black.”

This is, of course, where that “love thy neighbor” thing, and the lesson from the Good Samaritan parable, come into play – if I can put down my paint brush and can of black paint.

Photo taken of a wall hanging in the house.  Text was on a sign seen while running in the neighborhood.

“Practice hospitality.”  Romans 12:13

It is always nice to get clear instructions.  This two-word direction is about as short as an instruction can be – one verb, one noun.  But then I guess the complexity of the instructions are largely dependent on the meaning given to the noun – hospitality.  In common parlance we seem to have narrowed the use and meaning of “hospitality” to a transactional context, as in the “hospitality business” or “hospitality industry.”  Hospitality seems most commonly to be thought of as something that is expected on payment for it to a hotel or some other business entity providing services for a fee.

The biblical meaning of “hospitality” seems much broader.  In the Romans passage, the instruction comes as a summary of the paragraph above it (in a section captioned “Love” in my Bible) that includes admonitions about love (Love must be sincere.” v. 9), hate, honor, zeal, joy, hope, patience, and sharing (Romans 12:9-13), and thus the suggestion is that hospitality invokes all of those things.  There is no mention of a precondition of money changing hands.  The usage of the word in 1 Peter 9 is similar — “Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling.” — as is the context.  That usage (in a section captioned “Living for God” is preceded by a notation about  love — “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” v. 8

Okay, I suppose there is supposed to be some point to this meandering.  But I am not sure I can do better than the source.  Practice hospitality without precondition, without grumbling, and don’t hold your hand out for the tip.