Revelation

Sunrise today

    Have you ever felt the infidelity of “I know exactly how you feel”? The attempted comfort uttered by yourself to a dear friend or by someone to you, almost always spoken with good intention, nevertheless betrays the unique essence of profound, inarticulable experience. The holy inhabits silence. “No two sufferings are the same” emphasizes Stanley Hauerwas, in Naming the Silences: God, Medicine, and the Problem of Suffering (p. 3). Truth approximates instead in “the concrete particular”, 

and “knowledge, in the case of God, requires a lifelong transformation of the self” (p.10 & p.113 in Hauerwas' Theologian’s Memoir, Hannah’s Child).

Often the dawn revelation attempts to unveil the truth: Never the same place. The second hand ticks: a new creation alongside dying. Even side by side in the same instant, no two people share complete identity. Any photo taken, any image of reality cannot replicate another. In the silence, inarticulate, a person may approach the Divine. 

And yet, endowed with speech, especially in story, the transforming self may be shared. And through image/imagination.

Sunrise one week ago

Morning Message

 

Sunrise today reflects the night reading in Moses Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed [Translated by Lenn E. Goodman and Phillip I. Lieberman].

"All the spheres are living bodies with souls and minds that conceive God and know the sources of their being, the incorporeal minds that emanate from God and mediate between Him and every body in the world.” 

...“the spheres are alive, rational, and conscious… The Philosophers call them living beings that obey their Lord, praise and glorify Him—and what praise and glory it is! As it says, The heavens recount the glory of God [, the firmament tells of His handiwork] (Psalms 19:2). How far from the truth are those who read this as poetic personification!”  p. 194 II.4 and II.5