the song of songs

today´s reading

I hear my Beloved.

See how he comes

leaping on the mountains,

bounding over the hills.

My Beloved is like a gazelle,

like a young stag.

See where he stands

behind our wall.

He looks in at the window,

he peers through the lattice.

My Beloved lifts up his voice,

he says to me,

‘Come then, my love,

my lovely one, come.

For see, winter is past,

the rains are over and gone.

The flowers appear on the earth.

The season of glad songs has come,

the cooing of the turtledove

is heard in our land.

The fig tree is forming its first figs

and the blossoming vines give out their fragrance.

Come then, my love,

my lovely one, come.

My dove, hiding in the clefts of the rock,

in the coverts of the cliff,

show me your face,

let me hear your voice;

for your voice is sweet

and your face is beautiful.’

inversions

reading psalm 41 (and one or two others today - after a break which I blame partly and wrongly on overwork) the words invert in my mind:

not me yearning for you.
but you yearning for me.

in another:
not listen to me
but listen to Me.

heartstopping.

a thought

 the no-thing-ness of god
the every-thing-ness of christ
the linking spirit

Judaism is a religion of the people. dealing with the god of the everyday.
Christianity follows on from this: "giving wisdom to the simple".

but in our present scientific age this has made "religion" (I still hate this word) increasingly vulnerable.
we need to see our faith in a different way so that it does not clash head-on with our scientific knowledge.
in a complex world our faith has also to be more complex if it is to stand up to scrutiny of any sort.

A Hitchens youtube video comment

 I made a comment under one of the youtube videos which features Christopher Hitchens. This one was almost his last I think: an interview with Jeremy Paxman. Initially I wrote that C.H. spent a lot of time and energy raging against a tyrannical god that few people actually believed in but that, rather ironically, he had helped me delineate my own understanding of what god most definitely is NOT.
Someone replied facetiously that they were too busy reading about the genocide of the Amalekites (i Samuel) to finish reading my post.
This was my reply to this.

There are numerous passages in the OT which do just what Hitchens described. I am not denying any of that but these books date back to practically prehistoric times and were written for a wide range of reasons often by people who were clearly using God for their own nationalist purposes . (Little has changed there.) The way that God's nature is understood changes considerably (God doesn't change but human understanding of his nature) as time passes and the God of Jesus, although not exactly a seachange, is certainly a consolidation of the changes made in the final hundred years or so B.C. There are also many developments after the death of Jesus in how the Christian church was coming to understand the nature of God - not least the concept of the Trinity. This latter is vitally important. 
  Furthermore, none of us can "understand" God and our conception of him can really only be developed and altered intrinsically through prayer and reflection.
  My own belief is that the progression from belief to unbelief comes about gradually once personal prayer amd commitment has ceased. (personal experience). Once one decides that he doesn't exist it's ridiculously easy to fall back on the childish "old merciless tyrant in the sky" thinking.
  One thing I still don't understand though about Christian thinking even today: why do people still belief that he is omnipotent? I just don't see it! The God that I have come to know does not have power to intercede in natural disasters and has handed over the reins to us when it comes to daily life. Miracles only happen when people make them happen.

I need to reflect a bit on the final paragraph.  I am certain that God is not "omnipotent".  But "handed over the reins"?

01

Young Sheldon presently on Netflix has a dream in which he converses with what I think is called the binary system and it gave me pause.

01

Without 0 there cannot be 1.

Actually later on there is an episode where Sheldon (now a lot older) panics that 0 might not exist. I think he and his professor colleagues concluded the crisis by deciding that they simply had to pretend that it did.