Tag: Misunderstandings

Surrender to God . . .

Committe Domino viam tuam, et ipse faciet.” (Ant. 1, Office of Readings, Tuesday, Week II, of The Liturgy of the Hours according to the Roman Rite).
    In the approved English edition, it’s translated as, Surrender to God, and he will do everything for you.

    Surrender.  1. to yield (something) to the possession or power of another; deliver up possession of on demand or under duress.  2. to give (oneself) up, as to the police.  3. to give (oneself) up to some influence, course, emotion, etc.  4. to give up, abandon, or relinquish.  5. to yield or resign (an office, privilege, etc.) in favor of another.  6. to give oneself up, as into the power of another; submit or yield.

    I like the translation of the antiphon. It could have been something more literal like, Commit your way to the Lord . . ., but Surrender to God . . . (The Grail translation) is much more evocative and emotional.
    The antiphon introduces the first part of Psalm 37, which is filled with great advice relating to this total surrender:

    – Do not fret because of the wicked; do not envy those who do evil . . .
    – If you trust in the Lord and do good, then you will be secure . . .
    – If you find your delight in the Lord, he will grant your heart’s desire.
    – Commit your life to the Lord, trust in him and he will act . . .
    – Be still before the Lord and wait in patience . . .
    – Calm your anger and forget your rage; do not fret, it only leads to evil.

    We’re usually continually caught up in a myriad of distractions, concerns, worries, plans, frustrations, regrets, disappointments responsibilities, and other such like.

    What a relief it can be to just surrender. No, that’s not a copout nor a failure nor an irresponsibility. Surrendering to God is an honest admission that we are but limited creatures who inevitably are inadequate without divine help.
    Not surrendering to God is
delusional, foolish, and self-destructive. God is not an enemy, but a friend. All that is good and meaningful and satisfying about our lives is rooted in our conformity with the designs of our maker.
    Surrendering to God, to the one whose love created and sustains us, is not a relinquishing of our life and liberty but a fulfillment.
    What an illogical, if not insane, course of action it is to try to live our lives ignoring our creator’s will.
    Surrendering to God is not a negative act but a positive one. It enhances and expands our lives. It requires courage, strength, generosity, and wisdom. It’s not for the weak, fearful, foolish, for the spiritually deaf, dumb, and blind.
    The Latin verb, committo, committere, also lies behind our English word, commitment, meaning an act of pledging or engaging oneself; dedication or allegiance; consignment or confinement.
    Somehow or other, commitment has a sort of legal flavor, somewhat abstract, associated with obligations and responsibilities.
    On the other hand, surrender sounds more like an act of heart than just of head, a total giving of all that one is, not just an acceptance of one more duty or responsibility.
    Lord, give me the wisdom, strength, and courage to surrender to you!


4 September 2022

Imperfection

If someone accused you of being imperfect, would you consider it to be an insult and be offended?
   On the other hand, if someone called you perfect, would you consider it to be a sort of complement and appreciate it?
   Both words come from the Latin verb perficio, especially its past participle form perfectus meaning brought to an end, completed, finished.
   They’re not judgmental words. It doesn’t mean, e.g., that you won, but simply that you persevered to the end.
   Forgive me, then, for stating the obvious: you’re an imperfect person, not a perfect one—after all, you’re not dead yet!
   Sometimes “imperfect” is taken to mean relating to or characterized by defects or weaknesses, but that may be unfair. Imperfect basically means that it’s not over yet, it’s a work in progress.
   We all are meant to be perfectionists—we all are meant to persevere, despite the challenges and setbacks, and to continue to run life’s race until it is completed, for better or for worse.
   If you were selected to race in the Olympics, that selection itself would be a great honor and recognition whether or not you later got a special medal for outstanding performance.
   No matter what, nor where, nor when, each of us is imperfect—and we continue to be imperfect every day of our life until it’s over; that’s when we become perfect.
   The judgement of our lives is not comparative; we’re not competing in a contest—we’re just striving to make it through, as best we can, to the end.
   But . . . not anything goes. We’re not monkeys, birds, sloths, or antelope, we’re human beings. We must persevere as human beings until our end. We must live our lives according to God’s design and will until our end.

   It’s possible to make it through till the end in the basic sense of surviving, but we may not when it comes to the quality of our lives and the realization of our potential.
   Remember, Jesus said (cf. Luke 9:23-24):

 . . . If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.

   Regarding this, the quality of our lives and Jesus’ challenging standards, we also are imperfect and living imperfect lives.
   All our life, spiritually too, is a work in progress. Fumbling, bungling, or not, we’re all engaged in a daily struggle involving self-denial and perseverance in imitating the Lord as best we can.
   You may be an imperfect follower of Jesus right now, in the sense of having defects or weaknesses. But, your life’s journey is not yet ended.
   If you persevere until the end trying to live as he teaches, your life is a success story, whether or not you get some recognition and award for outstanding performance.
   Everyone who gets to heaven is a saint, a holy person, whether canonized a saint and held up as a model to be imitated or not!
   Men or women who enter a religious order and take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience used to be considered “in a State of Perfection”. More accurately they are in a state of seeking perfection, seeking to be poor, chaste, and obedient until the end of their lives.
   But, like all of us, they really are in a state of imperfection until their lives are done!


14 August 2022

Guinea Kids

Guinea pig: 1. A short-eared, tailless rodent often used in scientific experiments or kept as a pet.  2. The subject of any sort of experiment.

   You know, you’re a sort of guinea pig yourself. Don’t be offended. It’s not a put-down. I am, too. Everybody is.
   Isn’t every child born a kind of subject of an experiment? The experimenters—the mother and the father—are not well-trained professionals with extensive schooling and training in the fine art of having and raising children.
   The experimenters range from historically, socially, educationally, culturally similar people to widely diverse.
   This means that the newborn child often may be similar to his/her extended family members and easily welcomed. On the other hand, the newborn child sometimes may bear little resemblance to most of his/her extended family members and perhaps be hesitatingly welcomed.
   In every case, every child born is unique and a blend, a combination of many diverse genes, cultures, and personal traits. Every newborn child is a kind of subject of an experiment on the part of his/her parents.
   First of all, every newborn child is part woman (mother) and part man (father). Also, every newborn child learns what it means to grow up not only from these two diverse parents but also from diverse others in his/her immediate and extended family as well as friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and still others—who may be somewhat similar or widely diverse.
   In view of the inexperience of parents, the diversity of positive and negative influences, and the vicissitudes of early life, it’s amazing that each one of us survived, not to mention flourished.
   (Of course, thanks be to God, our birth and development did involve God, too!)

   If your parents were very different from one another and others in your neighborhood as well, you probably grew up being comfortable and at home with a high degree of diversity—and vice-versa!
   The experiencing of diversity and the challenges of understanding are not confined to childhood alone. They usually continue all through our lives.
   Thanks be to God for the diversity of our contemporary world and the different languages, traditions, cultural mores, and people that are part of our daily life!
   We all were used to diversity all the time in our early life. Whatever happened to us that we often seem to have lost our ability to live with and accommodate ourselves to it?
   Remember, we’re all “guinea kids”. We’re all subjects of a great and never-ending experiment. We’re all different from one another to one degree or another.
   We’re all special and unique with special and unique talents and gifts, special and unique capacities and abilities, and special and unique roles to play in life.
   What’s really dumb, wasteful, and deadly is for us to seek to avoid diversity, change, and challenge and to cling to what was instead of dealing with what is and what’s next.
   Each one of us is an experimental model, each one of us is constantly changing, each one of us lives by observing, studying, and experimenting.
   If a guinea pig were asked, “Aren’t you tired of being tested and experimented with? Don’t you want to be left in peace?”
   The pig might well reply, “Are you crazy? You want me dead? That’s who I am and what I do! My nature is to be experimental.”
   Yours and mine, too!


17 July 2022

Seeing, Knowing, and Understanding Better

Your eyesight might not be so very bad, but, even so, being fitted with the right pair of glasses can be a revelation. You may discover that you haven’t been seeing things so clearly as you thought you were.
   The same thing happens with more knowledge about different things or more detailed knowledge about the same thing—that is, being surprised by the value or importance or the lack thereof of someone or something you thought you knew well.
   But seeing better and knowing better are still not quite the same as understanding better. You can see something more clearly and know something in more detail without necessarily understanding better.
   Christopher Columbus suspected that the world was round, not flat. That why he was convinced that he could find a better way to India and the East Indies than the long route south to the remotest tip of the African continent, around it, and sailing still further East.
   He felt vindicated once he saw the islands (of the Caribbean) and their native people who he was mistakenly sure were Indians!
   Columbus’s contributions were still great: he saw and knew important things even if he misunderstood some of them.
   That may be a pretty good description of most of us. We may see things and people, get to know them, and still profoundly misunderstand them.
   That’s why life is a never-ending process involving seeing, knowing, and understanding—which involves a never-ending process of change and development.
   It’s okay if you don’t mind not seeing so clearly—or not knowing that much about other things or people—or not understanding the what or why or how of so many things.
   But, you may be getting somethings wrong. Like Columbus, you may encounter something new and mistake it for what it is.

   Living things are changing things. Living people are changing people. You’re always going to be challenged to see more clearly, to know more and better, and to understand things and people more deeply.
   Insights change and develop. Knowledge expands and deepens. Understanding grows and develops—and so do you and everyone else still alive and kicking!
   This includes beliefs, religion, God, right, wrong, good, and bad. Our customs, faith, and understandings constantly change and develop.
   Like Columbus, we may celebrate that some of our ideas were fundamentally right, even though we still may mistake a lot of the details about where we are and who really are the people we’re encountering.
   We may venerate the Bible and still at the same time no longer believe some of things people believed many centuries ago. Hopefully, that’s progress and development—even though sometimes we get it wrong, not right!
   What do we really understand about God? Who really is Jesus? Does everything his followers say, teach, and do really reflect his teachings? Do we always, frequently, sometimes, or rarely get it right when we encounter a new place, new people, new ideas, or new directions?
   Our change and development in all things is never-ending. New people, new things, new insights are our daily diet.
   Are you tired of it all, do you wish it would stop, do you want everything to be just like you remember it? If you do, beware! You may be yearning for life’s end.
   Life involves change and development. If you stop changing and developing, it’s over!


10 April 2022

Discovering England

I always associate Gilbert K. Chesterton’s great book, “Orthodoxy” with the odd but provocative sort of metaphor he used in its introductory chapter about the “English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas.”
   It set the tone for the whole, following work. As Chesterton went on to say about his voyager who sailed and searched all around the world and then discovered the riches of what was right under his nose at home, “How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?”
   The challenge of each of our lives is not really about our being at home in the world, but about our being astonished at it—or, rather, our failure to be astonished at it!
   It’s not that “familiarity breeds contempt” (Chaucer), but more that familiarity breeds indifference, taking things for granted, not marveling at the wonder, greatness, and gift of the world and our lives in it.
   If you’re tempted to puzzle over why the world situation is what it is, why there are so many problems unsolved, why things seem to be going from better to worse, try turning off the (bad) news programs and really looking at yourself in the mirror.
   Why me? What’s the expectation for me? How come there is a me? Where is my life going? How much more of it will I have? How can I pick up the broken pieces of it and continue?
   The challenge for us bedazzled viewers, listeners, readers, travelers is to stop! to stop and think! to stop and thank!
   We don’t want to be remembered as “much ado about nothing”.
   For starters, how come you exist, really? Why were you born? Where is your life going? Are you asleep at the wheel? How much longer and more will it take?

   We all need to remember to look at life, and the course of our own lives, with astonishment—with wonder, gladness, gratitude, and thankfulness.
   How can you look forward to an unknown tomorrow with enthusiasm and joy, if you are blind to what is right under your nose, so to speak, right now?
   That we exist at all is a wonder—and wonderful. That each time we awake to a new day is a gift—and we give thanks to God who created us and ever guides our lives.
   What do we use to measure and evaluate our lives? Possessions? Reputation? Power? Privilege? Beauty? Attractiveness? Health? Care? Concern? Generosity? Sacrifice? Humility? Sincerity? Love?
   The human condition and everlasting temptation is that no matter what we’ve done it’s never enough. Of course! We are not totally self-sufficient. We are creatures, and we must to look to our Creator for understanding, guidance, courage, and strength.
   The man who discovered England really is a good metaphor for all of us.
   All that we ever really need to know is right under our noses. What we seem to be yearning, searching, and journeying to find we’ve always had, even though we forget.
   It’s challenging enough to understand anything well, and our lives have a long history of incomplete understandings and misunderstandings. It’s normal enough, although it’s regrettable.
   Anyway, St. Augustine got it right when he said, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”


27 March 2022

Studying Life

The (Greek) root meaning of Biology is Life-Study. In other words it is the study of life and living things.
   In high school, I had a great Biology teacher. He taught us to use a microscope to study unicellular organisms.
   Amoebas were fascinating, especially their ability to move about, change their shape, and reproduce by dividing into two!
   Some of us liked the Biology class so much that we persuaded the teacher to offer us an additional elective course in Zoology, one of three traditional major branches of Biology. (The others are Botany and Microbiology.)
   Although Biology means the study of life, studying and learning about life embraces much more than Biology, Zoology, or other related sciences. In the broadest sense, every thinking living person is studying, experiencing, and learning about life all the time.
   We’re usually preoccupied by aspects of life, especially of our own lives—physical, emotional, intellectual, psychological, and spiritual to name a few.
   And, it’s a course of study that never quite ends. No matter how old or experienced we may be, we’re still studying, experiencing, and learning about life!
   Faith and religion are part of learning about life, too. They involve studying, experiencing, and learning about the universe we live in, life itself, living things, their relations, and their creator’s designs.
   Hopefully, you had the good fortune to have had good examples and teachers of faith and religion and to have learned to use religious teachings, theology, and scripture to study the meaning and purpose of life.
   Religion is more than a matter of customs, social standards, rules, and regulations that dictate and even restrict personal behavior.
   Social standards, rules, and regulations are changeable and even arbitrary. A good example of this is the ten commandments.

   For example, Exodus 20:8-10 says, Remember the sabbath day [day of rest]—keep it holy. Six days you may labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God…
   Devote Jews observe this, but Christians do not. Instead their day of rest is the first day of the week, Sunday. Literally, this is disobeying one of the commandments.
   Our understandings of many things religious always have been changing: what’s right and wrong, good and bad, virtue and sin as well as our understandings of God and the will and designs of God, the purpose and destiny of life, the meaning of scripture, theology, and church teachings.
   Sometimes our changed understandings are misunderstandings; sometimes they are rediscoveries of lost or misunderstood original meanings; sometimes they are new or enhanced understandings, new insights into the will and designs of God.
   If we really are studying life and living things, then we are necessarily experiencing change, for better or for worse, and, hopefully, developing and evolving.
   All this is of the very nature of life. The simplest of living things—for instance, the amoebas, move about, change their shape, and reproduce and multiply.
   How much more complicated and complex are our lives, our understandings of our purpose, and our limited insights into the nature of God and his designs and will.
   To bewail and avoid change, always clinging to what is familiar, comfortable, and secure, is to behave like an immobile caterpillar who is reluctant to break out of its enfolding cocoon, never realizing that its ultimate destiny is to fly!


20 March 2022

Experiencing and Experimenting

It’s important to know how words shift, change, and develop in their meaning as centuries pass. If we understand where they came from and how they have evolved, we can use them better and more accurately. For instance:
   The Latin verb experior basically means to try, test, prove, put to the test. Hence it can mean:
   – to make trial of a person
   – to know by having tried, to know by experience
   – to try to do a thing
   – (as a present participle, experiens) enterprising, venturesome
   – (as a past participle, expertus) tested, tried, approved or with experience, experienced
   It’s at the root of the English word, experience, which can mean:
   – a particular instance of personally encountering or undergoing something
   – the process or fact of personally observing, encountering, or undergoing something
   – the observing, encountering, or undergoing of things generally as they occur in the course of time
   – knowledge or practical wisdom gained from what one has observed, encountered, or undergone
   It’s also at the root of the English word, experiment, which can mean:
   – a test, trial, or tentative procedure; an act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of testing a principle, supposition, etc.
   – the conducting of such operations
   – (as a verb) to try or test, especially in order to discover or prove something

   Generally, the methodology of science includes almost all these meanings, since it involves observing, researching, theorizing, testing, analyzing, and concluding.

   Generally, the methodology of religion includes some of the meanings associated with experience, but hardly at all those associated with experiment.
   In scientific methodology, experiments are necessary to verify the validity and truthfulness of a theory. Whether the experiment succeeds or fails, it has value in the learning process.
   However, in religious methodology, a failed experiment is not usually appreciated as a value in the learning process. Usually it is identified as a moral defect, a negative judgement of the experimenter, and as a violation of accepted rules and regulations.
   Human nature being what it is, most people have grown and developed, instinctively using a methodology that is more “scientific”. In other words, we’ve learned by trial and error.
   We either try and err ourselves or we trust the shared conclusions of others who have tried and erred before us.
   The very essence of our learning process involves making mistakes.
   Actually the trial and error methodology works in religious matters as well. There, too, we learn by trying and erring ourselves or trusting the shared conclusions of others who have tried and erred before us.
   However, in religious affairs often the learning process is thwarted since our trying and erring may be censored and identified as evil and sinful. The expectation usually is that we should totally and exclusively trust and be guided by the wisdom of others who have gone before us.
   Hopefully, our “Last Judgement” won’t confuse our in-good-faith erring with our stubbornly repeating failed experiments!


13 March 2022

Religious Imagination

There’s a time and place for religious imagination—for “make believe”. It’s only human to embellish (that is, to beautify, to enhance) factual matters, and with long-term traditions the embellishment may get pretty elaborate.
   When the facts are few and far between, or when they are very slim and easily overlooked, it’s only human that we relate them with more and more descriptive words or imagined supplementary details.
   However, the embellishments may become so many and so elaborate as to disguise or distort the truth itself. That’s why in sworn testimony we call on God as our witness that we are telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
   Take the case of Nicholas of Myra. In the 4th century, in the Eastern Roman Empire, he was the Christian bishop of a town now known as Demre in Turkey.
   There are many traditions about him, most focused on and praising his generosity and secret gift-giving. The best known is about how he rescued three girls whose family was so poor that they had no dowry money for marriages for them by dropping small bags of gold coins through the window of their home at night.
   That’s about it. There are many embellishments in stories about his life, legends really, but very few “hard facts”. His feast is celebrated on December 6th or, in some places, December 19th.
   This is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the origins of the Santa Claus story—but, oh so many elaborations and embellishments over the centuries, so much imagination.
   The majority of modern descriptions of St. Nicholas/Santa Claus are shaped by the famous 1823 poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas”, and his visits are more associated now with the birthday of Jesus than Nicholas’s own feast day.

   In any case, all this is a great illustration of the role of imagination in religious life and faith—and, in this case, the excessive role of imagination.
   It’s only human that we relate the factual matters of our religious faith with descriptive words or imagined supplementary details. But, we don’t want the embellishments to be so many or so elaborate that they disguise or distort the truth itself.
   The contemporary temptation is to hastily and carelessly discard religious traditions, customs, and teachings from centuries before as though they were purely works of imagination.
   Patience! Of course, they were embellished. We can’t communicate effectively merely by citing the judicially correct, bare-bones, root truth—and especially when we’re trying to communicate (in the best sense of the word) a mystery.
   It’s not a terrible thing to tell little kids about Santa Claus, but it would be if you swore on a Bible that it is “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God!”
   It’s not a terrible thing to teach kids standard catechism questions and answers and religious customs, but as they grow up they need to sift the root truths about matters of faith from religious imaginations that have embellished them over the years.
   When kids grow up, they don’t usually abandon their parents for telling them so many detailed embellishments about Santa Claus, but they do sort out the “hard facts” and know that there really are in this world exemplary people like St. Nicholas.


20 February 2022

Superus, Superior, Supremus

Positive: superus -a -um, situated above, upper, higher.
Comparative: superior -ius, of place: higher, upper; of time: earlier, former, past: of rank: higher, greater.
Superlative: supremus -a -um, of place: highest, uppermost; of time or succession: last, final: of degree: highest, greatest; of rank: highest.

   As you can see from the Latin above, the similar words in English haven’t changed in meaning very much over the centuries. For instance, supreme is defined as:
   – highest in rank or authority; paramount; sovereign; chief.
   – of the highest quality, degree, character, importance, etc.
   – greatest, utmost, or extreme.
   – last or final; ultimate.
   Although sometimes we over-use the word or its derivatives, we’re always ranking things, places, ideas, values, scores, athletes, office-holders, and whatnot. But, no matter what we’re ranking, you can’t have more than one supreme at a time!
   Sometimes we speak of God as the Supreme Being. That sort of presumes that on a scale or ranking of gods or divinities, there’s one on top!
   Actually, in ancient times it was common among many peoples and in many places to worship multiple gods or divinities and to rank them. For example, for the Romans, the highest ranking, most powerful god was Jupiter. (That why the biggest planet in our solar system was named after him!)
   When you study the Bible, you learn of the gradual development of monotheism—the realization that there is only one god.
   Abraham and his immediate descendants worshiped and obeyed a god they thought of as their personal or family or tribal god. He was theirs and guided and protected them.

   It was a long, slow development to arrive at the belief or realization that there is only one God and that no other gods exist at all.
   Even so, still among monotheistic believers there are some lingering, sort of polytheistic attitudes.
   For example, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all believe that there is only one God, the Supreme Being—and there can’t be three different Supreme Beings.
   So, if all three are worshiping the one God, they are worshiping the same God.
   If good Jews, Christians, and Muslims aspire to live on with God someday, they will be living together. If their destiny is to be living together, why have they treated each other so badly so often?
   They are fellow creations of the one and same God, even though they may use different names for God, worship God in different ways, and have different customs.
   And, of course, there are other religions and other ways of worshiping the one and same God, and the same applies to them.
   We shouldn’t disparage worshiping the one and same God in different places or using different languages and practices.
   We shouldn’t consider people who misunderstand or betray the teachings of the one and same God as though they were the truest and best exponents of the one God’s values and teachings.
   We shouldn’t keep fighting over possession and control of parts of the one world, if we truly believe that the one and same God made it to be shared by all.
   Above all, we should treat every other person as a brother or sister, created by the one and same God to live with us in the one and same world.


13 February 2022

Frames of Reference

Frame of reference:  a structure of concepts, values, customs, views, etc., by means of which an individual or group perceives or evaluates data, communicates ideas, and regulates behavior.

   We all have and utilize frames of reference, and much of the time we barely realize it or advert to them.
   Here’s a simple example. When I was a child and started school in New York City, the first question I was asked by the other kids was, “What are you?”
   In those days and in that place, the question meant, “What is your national background or family origins?”
   (Since the United States was generally an immigrant country, what differentiated people was the country they or their parents or other relatives came from.)
   I never had a simple answer like Italian, French, or English. I had to explain that my father was of German descent (German Jewish, since “Stern” was immediately identified as a Jewish name) and my mother, of Irish descent (presumably Catholic of course).
   My parents had agreed before marriage to raise their children as Catholics, and so I was, but the confusion lingered. Even as a young priest, sometimes I was asked how old I was when I converted (i.e., became a baptized Catholic)?
   Sometimes I enjoyed answering, “A couple of hours!” My birth was difficult for my mother, and I was presumably dying at birth and hastily baptized.
   The expected kind of answer to, “What are you?” would have been very different in another place or time. The answer might well have been your caste, trade, tribe, or social class.
   Some other frames of reference in our lives are more subtle and less obvious.

   For example, religious teachings, practices, and beliefs. First, they vary among different religions, but they also vary within the same religion. They may be fixed and unchanging or developing and evolving.
   In Christian tradition we still have a lot of words and practices which originated in and reflect a different physical, scientific, social, or other frame of reference. For example:
   – a flat world: the good go up (heaven) and the bad go down (hell).
   – a ranking of persons: “clergy” (upper or ruling class) and “laity’ (lower or subject class).
   – degrees or kinds of divinity or godliness: the blessed Trinity, angels and their ranks and functions, saints and their distinctiveness and roles.
   Often religious misunderstandings and conflicts are rooted in frames of reference that are not recognized as such.
   If you’re familiar with the great works of St. Thomas Aquinas, you can’t help but be dazzled by their depth and breadth. But, his frames of reference, besides Christian faith and the customs of his day included the philosophy of the pagan Aristotle.
   Many disagreements within Christianity are rooted in different cultures, practices, historical traditions, and linguistic systems.
   A holy writer esteemed by some may be considered as unintelligible by others.
   “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin” may once have been a legitimate topic for debate among scholars long ago, but now is usually dismissed as a ridiculous and even meaningless question.
   The point is, we all have frames of reference. Try to be aware of them. and try to keep yours up to date!


30 January 2022