What positive emotion do you feel most often?
There is only one option for me: gratitude.
I am thankful to all the people who help me everyday (who pray for me), for the parish that has given me a place to live (to fulfil a vocation), and the many other things that I do not deserve but are still part of my life.
What is “power”? It is defined (on Google) as:
… the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behaviour of others or the course of events.
So, what is the power of the objective?
While I have a “philosophical issue” with language, I dislike how people use the word “unique”. And especially how sometimes people say “very unique”, “extremely unique”, or some other superlative qualifying “unique”.
A word I feel people use too much is “surreal”.
What brings you peace?
Solitude and silence. Not the absence of people or noise. But openness to presence and a willingness to listen.
I have created (with the help of faithful friends) a context in which I can live this peace. So the context – the place – is the real source of my peace. I feel called to a place. I feel the absence of this place.
Anyway …
Guggenheim: Can’t Help Myself
I am a fan of reader-response in literary theory. So when I saw this quote, it made me think:
I am not sure if the quote is actually from Zinzendorf. Yet, for me, the last part spoke to me. I am willing to be forgotten!? Or, another way, “you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).
It is one thing to speak about “hiddenness” and think about the anonymity of the solitary life. But am I prepared for the consequences?
No easy answers. But a desire for Jesus alone! Anyway …
One of the earliest pieces has this to say about reading:
It is, namely, the transubstantiation of experience; it is an unshakable certainty in oneself won from all experience, whether this has oriented itself only in all worldly relationships (a purely human standpoint, Stoicism, for example), by which means it keeps itself from contact with a deeper experience — or whether in its heavenward direction (the religious) it has found therein the centre as much for its heavenly as its earthly existence, has won the true Christian conviction “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor the present, nor the future, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Kierkegaard
Reading is much more than information but an experience that changes me. It is not something to do while I am bored but a choice for change.
Anyway …
I would open a bookshop which also serves various types of tea.
The books would be a range but, maybe, more existentialist. Maybe some Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Camus? The tea would be Russian! Or some Earl Gray. Leafs only. There would be afternoons for people to discuss ideas – any idea! Tea, books, and real conversation.
God is present in the moment of choice, not in order to watch but in order to be chosen. Therefore, each person must choose. Terrible is the battle, in a person’s innermost being, between God and the world. The crowning risk involved lies in the possession of choice.
Kierkegaard
The contribution which stands out, however, as one reads the debate a century later, came from Charles Grafton, Bishop of Fond du Lac in the USA, the only bishop present who had been a member of a community. He made three important points. First, he believed Religious Life was a vocation and should be treated as such. Second, it did not belong, as priesthood did, to the corporate life of the Church, but instead belonged ‘to the economy of the Holy Ghost’. Obedience to a Religious superior was a voluntary action of love, not the result of the legislative action of the Church. Unlike ‘the fixity of ministerial orders’ then, he believed the work of the Holy Ghost in the call of Religious Life manifested itself in a variety of different forms. Bishops had to trust this call to have a corrective power in itself. Third, he reminded the Conference that in Religious, bishops were dealing with ‘special devotional temperaments’ that could be ‘personally emotional’ about small matters of worship. A high-handed approach would not therefore be advisable. He went on to echo the arguments put forward in Father Puller’s paper, and concluded by suggesting bishops should regulate communities only in relation to property, financial donations and insisting on communities’ having sound government.
Petà Dunstan, Bishops and Religious 1897-1914
a fool and his prayer book 