61\u00a0 bar rises 29.87\u00a0 0mph N dew-point 53\u00a0 sunrise 5:59\u00a0 sunset 8:39\u00a0 Lughnasa<\/p>\n
New (Corn) Moon<\/p>\n
Outside tonight the sky has no moon.\u00a0 This illustrates the paradoxical nature of light.\u00a0 We think of light as illumination enabling us to see, but it has another, not often recognized property; it can obscure as well as reveal.\u00a0\u00a0 The night sky during the dark moon shines with stars, many invisible when the moon is brightest.\u00a0 A cool night with a clear sky, a panoply of stars, ancient messages from faraway places gives a northern summer its true character.\u00a0 Able to burn with heat in the daytime, the northern summer can cool down, remind us of the coming fall, just as Lughnasa, the Celtic first fruits holy day does.\u00a0 A convergence of a new moon, Lughnasa and cooling temperatures make this a night made for myth.<\/p>\n
The research for Heresy Moves West will probably end tomorrow.\u00a0 I hope I can get at writing, too, but I doubt it.\u00a0 Sunday.\u00a0 This is a big task, one I set for myself, but I’d like to get a first draft done, so I can set it aside for awhile.\u00a0 I have Stefan’s poems to edit and the Africa tour, too.\u00a0 Not to mention a firepit to dig, hemerocallis iris and lilium to move.<\/p>\n
A piece of this project troubles me.\u00a0 Maybe troubles is not the right word, provokes, that could be it.\u00a0 When Channing and the others split from the Standing Order Calvinist orthodoxy in New England, they started a cascade of controversy that has not ended.\u00a0 Not long after the Unitarians had left the congregationalists behind, Emerson began writing his essays and giving his lectures.\u00a0 With the strong push Transcendentalism got from Theodore Parker, there was soon a split over natural religion versus theistic religion.\u00a0 The Civil War obscured this problem for the first half of the 1860’s, but it re-emerged as the Western issue as the more radical, Parkerite ministers began to dominate the Western Unitarian Conference.\u00a0 This led to constant conflict with Eastern conservatives (used to denote those who wanted to retain Jesus as Christ, keeping Unitarianism’s original perception of itself as liberal Christianity).\u00a0 The Free Religious Association and The Ethical Culture movement kept the Western issue alive in the east.\u00a0 This split healed with a broad understanding of liberal religion, only to be sundered again in the 1920’s with the rise of humanism.\u00a0 Humanism set aside theism for good in the interest of a scientific and humanistic approach to the ethical life.<\/p>\n
Here’s the problem.\u00a0 Conservatives predicted the gradual erosion of religious sentiment if there was not at least the glue of Jesus to hold the center.\u00a0 Their predictions came true as the shift away from theism took its incremental, but, looking backward, inevitable progress toward an essentially secular movement focused on ethical living.\u00a0 This leaves the field free for radical inquiry into the nature of the human experience.\u00a0 A great, not small thing.<\/p>\n
But, it can lose the faith that burns in the heart, that seeks the reality next to or beyond this reality; it can lose it in the same kind of scientistic move that linguistic analysis made, that Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris make.\u00a0 It is, though, a bell that cannot be unrung, so we must seek this faith that burns in the heart elsewhere than in tradition.\u00a0 Good.\u00a0 Emerson thought so, too.\u00a0 The question is, where?<\/p>\n
Investigating this question will occupy some time, perhaps the next few years.<\/p>\n
When I went out to check the drying onions, I found one with a bit of a soft spot.\u00a0 I brought it inside to cut up for a salad for lunch.\u00a0 Cut open I put my fingers on the white flesh.\u00a0 It was very warm, almost hot.\u00a0 That drying would take place inside the onion had not occurred to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
61\u00a0 bar rises 29.87\u00a0 0mph N dew-point 53\u00a0 sunrise 5:59\u00a0 sunset 8:39\u00a0 Lughnasa New (Corn) Moon Outside tonight the sky has no moon.\u00a0 This illustrates the paradoxical nature of light.\u00a0 We think of light as illumination enabling us to see, but it has another, not often recognized property; it can obscure as well as reveal.\u00a0\u00a0 … Continue reading A Bell That Cannot Be Unrung<\/span>