Much to the relief of all, I stop screwing with the future.

 Much to the relief of all, I stop screwing with the future. 

As the great American philosopher once wrote and his echo sang, “Time keeps slipping into the future.” Or, as I wrote more recently, “Life goes on. It’s one of its enduring characteristics.”  “Enduring,” I wrote, not “endearing,” because in truth we hate that, that life keeps going wherever it’s slipping off to. We want to freeze the future. Then,

It can go on as we are going on right now, and our understandings of the past don’t need to change and we don’t either. OR,

It can become what we want it to become. The past will cease, and sheep will forever be sheep and goats will be burned to a crisp. Our friends will get what they deserve (up to a point, so long as they don’t get any more than we deserve); and our enemies will be drowned in a vat of flaming, boiling shit. No one less than God* will see to this.

The world will get cooler instead of warmer.

This is the last I have to say on this matter,** as it is increasingly clear, I am told, that I don’t know what I am talking about (though it doesn't necessarily follow that what I have been saying isn’t true).

01.25.16

 **   at present

Batman and Robin walk into an intimaterie . . .

          I am the editor, I know that; but about my relationship with Hamlin Moody,
     see here, here, and here. "I have been reading the blog," he said, when I saw him 
     on Sunday. I was leaving church; he was driving by and stopped. "I've been read-
     ing the blog, and it needs livening up. Preferably with something someone that didn't 
     go to whatever fancy college you went to can understand and appreciate. I'd like to 
     write something."
          I knew better, but unaccountably, I said, "Okay," and when this came in, I knew 
     better, but I couldn't retract that. "I can make a picture, too," he said, and he did.
     I am directly responsible only for the picture caption and the headline. ("Your
     cravenness?" my better angel leans over my shoulder and whispers at my ear.)
          Hamlin claims he overheard this story he just dropped off on a flash-drive at the
     grocery store, standing in the checkout line with a bag of dog food. There's a big 
     snow coming tomorrow.
          Today though it's supposed to get up near forty. Maybe we could play a few 
     holes of golf late. He could get off at four. If it was above thirty-five . . . ? I couldn't 
     say "no" to that either. Penance for this - think of it that way.

  Batman and Robin walk into an intimaterie . . .   

 

A.M. Intimaterie Archives
(Ektachrome slide by Peri)

“Holy Fexpletive Deleted, Batman!” Dick Grayson and Bruce Wayne found themselves – unaccountably! – in a cat house with the various women that had played Catwoman – Julie Newmar, Hallie Berry, Eartha Kitt, Michelle Pfeiffer, Ashley Madison (actually look-alikes), all naked and waiting. Dick and Bruce were naked, too. One of the rules of the house was that “johns” undressed at the door. Of course, they were allowed to retain any masks. But “Julie” recognized Bruce by an appendix scar. (They went to high school together, and . . . .)

     Thus the secret identities of the dynamic duo were unwittingly - and unknowingly to them – revealed. Fortunately a cat house is like a confessional. Prostitutes are like priests. Sort of.

- Hamlin Moody

  01.21.16   

There is no joy in Mudville, hope has won out. Special edition.

Schist, Sandstone, Eschatology, Hope

in the World According to the Hopeful, and the Anglican Communion

Ted Riich, B.A., Lo.S.[i]

Abstract

Raving on about what I know next to nothing proves dissatisfying even to me. But the main points: Hope is a way of thinking that is of extraordinary value to the hopeful. Eschatology is the science of proving what they want is what everybody else should be wanting as well. Joy is forbidden as it is takes time away from praying for the future that ought to be. Neither should love of neighbor interfere with hope in any way.

About theology I may not know “schist from sandstone,” as Uncle Albert might put it.[ii] I can read the little words between the big words, and I have a dictionary to look up the words I don’t know what I want them to mean. But I usually do know; like many “real” theologians, I’m prescient that way. I know what should happen next.

          So, I’m an . . . eschatologist!

          Do I know what that means? Eschatology. It’s about the future and what comes with and from it. - ex or e [from, out of] + scatology : Though we live in shit, God in Christ will pull the faithful out of it; the unfaithful will fall even deeper in, burning and reeking forever. And ever. Or so, many of my more faithful friends have told me. That is their hope and salvation.

And I say (to myself), “Thank God they’re saved.” Then, “Thank God, too, you can’t trust hope.” Because home is empty. Or so I believe; and so I liked and posted Uncle Albert’s sentence:

All hope is vain, because the future is not only not yet, it is never yet.

Then, one of my more liberal friends, actually, phoned to say how wrong Uncle Albert was. “The future may be not yet, but it can’t be never yet,” he protested, “because it is already.” And: “It is precisely the promise of the future in which we live in the present. Indeed, we can live in the present only because we have a future promise in which we hope.” Or, something like that.

          I dared to say that it was my fear (based on experience) that living in the future actually keeps us from living in the present as effectively as living in the past does.

          “Pay attention,” I was told. “I didn’t say ‘living in the future’ but ‘living in the present in the promise of the future.’”

          “Well,” I said, “I’m not sure that ‘living in the present in the promise of the future’ as opposed to ‘living in the future’ [period] is not a distinction without a difference. But let’s say there is, a difference. What are we living toward? - our hope that we’re saved and everybody else is pretty much fracked over?”

          My liberal friend, remember – he says: “I wasn’t talking about judgment either. Hope, dammit, and the whole Moltmann thing, the idea that God is drawing the church first but all creation as well toward the future God has prepared for us, for it, from the beginning. In Jesus, incidentally. So the future calls us to live presently as Jesus would have us live - in hope.”

          “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”

We hang up. I look up Moltmann [between modalism and monophysitism] in my dictionary. I get a glass of orange juice. I take a pill. I take a nap. All the while, even while I’m sleeping, I’m thinking “Bullshit.” My friend may know his theology. That is, he may know who Moltmann is, how many modes the Trinity truly has, and who they were (or weren’t) in Jesus-the-Christ,[iii] but he doesn’t know Jesus. The word “hope” never passes his (Jesus’) lips – in any of the gospels.[iv]

Which brings us to what is going on in the Anglican Communion, not that I know any more about that than I do about theology in general. So what follows is undoubtedly more schist and sandstone.

          But one way to see why the large majority of churches in the Communion just have to suspend the Episcopal Church in the United States from it is this: that majority thinks that if it doesn’t suspend these misguided americo-heretico-gayomarryingo pagans, the whole Church will go to hell in a handbasket. That would be its future. The horny goats could well drag God’s pure, chaste sheep down into eternal shingle with them.

          Hey, that could happen! At least, you’ve got to think through the possibility. Or, you’ve got to hope it through. It’s the same thing really, because hoping is a way of thinking; it’s a way of planning: it’s a way parsing,[v] in this case who’s going to be drowning in the shit or swimming in the ether (forever and ever, amen).

          So, the future gets in the way of the present. Once again: hope gets in the way of joy and love.[vi]

---

[i] Lost at Sea

[ii] There may be a reason not to put any stock in TRV stories from the Bible. [Link.] Or, it may be a reason to pay attention to them: I can’t have an axe to grind if I don’t have a grinder. (I can only have a bludgeon.)

[iii] Moltmann is a guy. There are no modes in the Trinity, because it doesn’t work that way, so none of them could have been in Jesus, but if they had been he would have been human anyway.

[iv] Hope is a Paul Jesus isn’t enough we’ve got to have a Christ and if we do he’s got to come again and if he comes again it’s got to be in judgment thing.

[v] Think it through carefully enough and you can make hope pretty certain. What all eschatologies have in common – those that frame them know what should happen. Now how do we make sure?

[vi] Paul gets in the way of Jesus once again – even among Anglicans!

 01.20.16