Oh, sometimes I find treasures when I blog hop. And today, I found another. He is now on my bookmarked blogs, and later will be linked with my others. I will be returning there.
In following a visitor's aol search, this piece showed up. I liked the way he wrote this, better than I had, but with thoughts so similar to my own. So I went on to read more on his site. And then I found another. And another. And another.
The first is about Kai Leigh Harriott, about how a little child leads us and demonstrated forgiveness and blew us away....
The second begins with a conversation he had with a health club worker, a teasing tidbit offered here, with encouragement to read the rest at his site:
"Have you ever heard of the Book of Revelations?" he asked me, brimming with sudden enthusiasm.
(I confess to the reader that I am too familiar with this sort of enthusiasm, and that I've long been wary of it.)
"Yes, of course, I've read it," I answered politely. I braced myself for a flurry of conspiracy theories; a blitz of prophetic utterances; a maelstrom of angst-laden visions. But no such portents came.
"You know," my interlocuter said, "as I read the news, and look at this time in history, I swear, events and the media are coming at us in such a way, that I feel like everybody is being forced to choose sides. Do you know what I mean? It's like you either have to choose side A or side B. You are either with us or against us. You either believe black, or white. I find it scary."
And then, the third listed here takes us back to the 'best of times' so many were part of, and still regard to be wonderful, though some of us realized then or later... that it was not.
Again, a teaser.... and an encouragement to read the rest of the article, done as a result of reading David Horowitz' autobiography, Radical Son.
By the time the 1960s came to a close, I was in fourth grade, all of nine years old. I recall that the '60s scared me: that the Black Panthers, assassinations, riots, and even the epileptic screaming of Janice Joplin simply frightened me. Having been born in the middle of a war, I found Vietnam scary as well, though the allure of combat teased not only my imagination but the backyard play-fantasies of my New Jersey playmates (till I moved to New Hampshire in 1968). And there, in second grade, in what may have been my first gesture of bravado, I recall telling classmate Timmy Tyrrell, who already was planning on being a minister (his whole family was devoted to that goal), that I wanted to grow up to be a "heroin addict," a boast I completed with a pantomime of shooting up: arm on my desk, sleeve rolled up, pencil heading deep into my vein - and Mrs. Barden nearby. I would join the rebellion, I declared, and I'll have my hair as long as Rapunzel's.
The last one I share today, in part, has this small segment. It is about the Gospel of Judas, and is very well-written....
.....That Judas' Jesus suddenly jumps out of his skin in a secret meeting with Judas is just laughable. I am even tempted to suggest that it is anti-semitic, for the Jews of Jesus' time were people not readily given to the gnostic, anti-flesh, anti-material ecstacies of their more 'enlightened' neighbors. Gnosticism was deemed heresy by the Church for two important reasons: It denigrates the physical world, and it elevates certain people to a preferred, enlightened status, giving them the aura of transcendence, an aura that is damned for its presumptuousness and conceit.
Trust me when I say that there are plenty of gnostics among us, and a vast number of them are far more likely to read Elaine Pagels' Gnostic Gospels and this message from Judas the Betrayer than they are to read the Gospel of St. John.
Addendum at 2:35 pm April 16, 2006:
I can't seem to leave Contratimes' blog today...
Another
Another
