Christianity as a SPECIFIC way of being.

Jordan Peterson and Bishop Barron, Christianity as a Way of Being

Here's something I learned and fought off until I embraced it: 

When you get converted, or saved, you really need to embrace the full-life version of some group that are the people of God, something where they have a group-approved way to dress, walk, talk, limits of acceptable weirdness, and way of seeing everything.  

The heavy handed groups who spell those things out we call "cults." The friendly ones are churches with some kind of history and some kind of internal integrity.  The utterly fruitless and helpless ones are those who make no demands except for believing a few things and confessing a few things, which means they make no demands at all.

Understand this rightly: you can't find the *reality* of salvation by believing the gospel and confessing Jesus is Lord--which I believe to me necessary and non-negotiable, and if you go through getting saved in reality, GOD will bring you into The Church in some REAL expression. You can think of this step of the life of faith as what Baptism means, or, what makes Baptism make sense beyond just a hoop you have to jump through. (I understand that things we NEED to do in life LOOK LIKE hoops to jump through until after the fact.).  

You have to jump into the deep end of the pool, which means that we have to give up a shallow view of Christian life, and yielding up oneself to a *specific* version of a Christian way of Being.

A Review of Desolation Row, a song by Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan, Desolation Row.

https://youtu.be/GoegcebfdGc?si=lYCoT-6A-VUvv9Mu

This song Desolation Row,has meant much to me over the years, because in my interpretation, it spoke about the desolation people face in the world without God, ergo world without meaning, ergo T.S. Eliot's *wasteland*, ergo Leonard Cohen/Sharon Robinson's Boogie Street.  

   So come, my friends, be not afraid

   We are so lightly here

   It is in love that we are made

   In love we disappear

   Tho' all the maps of blood and flesh

   Are posted on the door

   There's no one who has told us yet

   What boogie street is for

I suspect that my 1969+,  four-year college, Woodstock/Altamont/Isle of Wight cohort were among the first to be launched out into a full-blown world aptly described as Desolation Row, 

a world which was nicely hidden beneath layers of eccentricities and strange habitués of drug users, slavers, and beatnik-homosexuals; a world described by Bob in his album liner-notes length poem on Peter Paul and Mary *In The Wind* LP 

[http://www.peterpaulandmary.com/music/f-03.htm], 

in which he introduces, by the way, the firemen rounding up the hipster intellectuals and Cinderella sweeping up after the ambulances go: 

Everybody used t hang around a heat pipe poundin subterranean/coffee house called the Gaslight-/It was at that time buried beneath the middle a MacDougal Street-/It was a strange place an not out a any schoolbook-/More'n seven nites a week the cops and firemen'd storm down the/steps handin' out summons for trumped up reasons-/

More'n five nites a week out a town bullies'd start trouble an/everybody from John the owner t Dave the cook t Rod the cash/register ringer t Adele the waitress t anybody who was on the/stage t just plain friends who were hangin around would have/t come up swingin dishes an handles an brooms an chairs an/sometimes even swords 'at hung on the wall in order t match/the bullies' weight an the bullies was always big bullies-/

   

  and this world was introduced dramatically in a watershed moment, the introduction to Zanuck's The Grapes of Wrath, where Tom Joad meets Jim Casy, the preacher without faith and without hope.  

Tom Joad Meets Desolate Preacher Jim Casy

https://youtu.be/N9cFmSKSTiU?si=FquSwc8bhqHBnfB3

The world all rolls downhill from there.  The folks go to California without any Do-Re-Mi, and the kids are ready to flee to Desolation Row, both places devoid of meaning, without God, and without hope in the world.  And some went into the military--either as Lt. Dan or as Steve McQueen's character in The Sand Pebbles.

Desolation Row, the song, then, illustrates the new world we've been still-born into, a world long prophesied and which holds the illusion of the new default.  

The illusion is not true, the illusion is not reality. 

Faith is as hard to come by as ever, it takes a miracle (but miracles are hard to come by these days).  Desolation Row is possible to escape, but digging out from the "of-course-ness" of it all is a terrible journey.  

What's going to keep your feet nailed to the platform when the Sunset Limited comes through at 90 miles an hour?

Without reservation, I recommend the movie The Sunset Limited starring Tommy Lee Jones (dir.), Samuel L. Jackson, and written by Cormac McCarthy (No Country For Old Men, The Road, All the Pretty Horses).  It's a two-man play adapted with minimal changes to the screen.  Jones plays White, a burnt-out history/philosophy professor who is suicidal, Jackson plays Black, a convicted murderer who found Jesus in prison and is now living a quiet life in a low-rent New York City apartment. Black prevents White from stepping in front of the commuter train The Sunset Limited, brings him home, and they talk together for ninety minutes about life, death, and find some human connection and mutual understanding.  White presents a personalized version of Existentialist-Nihilism, and Black presents a personalized version of pietistic Christianity.  The movie is not a comedy in either the popular sense or the classical sense.  My own awe at the movie is with Cormac McCarthy's ability to capture the inner perspective of a  born-again ex-con who has drunk deeply from the Waters of Life and a career academic who has drunk deeply from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.  

The Sunset Limited - Behind the Scenes Featurette

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM9esxT4GRs

JORDAN PETERSON | The relationship between Disgust & Sex

    

Pretty interesting.  

First is the short clip on disgust and sex, followed by the original lecture.            

https://youtu.be/35e5i6FQuMw

also at this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35e5i6FQuMw&t=1s

Covid Questions

In 2020, epidemiological reports falsely listed covid as the cause of death of large numbers of elderly patients. False numbers may or may not be the case, but news and medical agencies did not investigate. If any group did investigate, the reports were not made known. There was ample political and financial motivation to falsify the numbers. No one seems to be investigating these apparent misreports.

The PCR Covid test reportedly has a high false-positive rate. The values would be on the insert sheet for the test. Typically, patients do not receive the insert sheet to know the rates of true positives and false positives and true negatives and false negatives. The point is that false positives make the infection rates appear worse than they are.

Because the public believes reports of false-positive rates, decision-makers cannot tell when the public has reached herd immunity. Although Covid should act like any other virus, the US rates seem too high for our population.

There is an uncommon push not to allow advocacy of early treatment, e.g., anti-viral-replicating drugs. The data seems reasonably supportive of early treatment when started early. 

These facts and observations raise suspicions of political intrusion into medicine, lowering the credibility of medical opinion.

Music of The Spheres of Someone's Life

 There are a few music-makers whose music hovers close toward me and mine.  Usually, I have two immediate responses: two steps forward, "YES!" and a muted one step out of the queue, "But what about that?"   Haha, I was just looking at the lineup to the 2019 music fest at Nowhere Else, the ranch of Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist, collectively known as Over the Rhine.  

Here's that poster. * 

*not 2021, mind you.  

Yes indeed. These are all such good people, and they make such good music.  About that "other" reaction, well, sometimes I look in the mirror and ask, "Who are you and what did you do with the guy?"  Probably the more comfortable we all get with life, the easier it is to love people and ourselves with comfort and grace, letting us all be what we are and not what we wish.  

Over the Rhine, or Linford and Karin, have a festival coming up this year.  Three days of peace and understanding, I think that's what I heard.  Maybe that was some other festival, I don't know.  But knowing the good folk at Nowhere Else, we can trust that the three days are likely to be the odds-on favorite bet for a good time in 2021.

While I'm saying nice things about music and musicians, let me share with you my admiration for Susie Glaze, who, with her husband Steve Rankin and long-time musical friends Fred Sanders and Mark Indictor, play good music and aim for the high ground, shall we say. I just love these folks. This recent performance was brought to my attention, and I'd like to bring it to yours.

https://youtu.be/lLa9AYEGQTg

FYI, you can find both Over The Rhine's festival and Susie Glaze by following these links, and you'll also find a hearty helping of each over at YouTube.

http://www.nowhereelsefestival.com/#nowhere-else-festival  (This is for the 2021 festival.)

http://overtherhine.com

https://www.susieglaze.com

(In an earlier version, I had a picture of Antje Duvekot's album cover, "The Near Demise of the High Wire Dancer."  https://www.antjeduvekot.com/index.php?page=cds&display=1007  Please visit Antje at https://www.youtube.com/user/AntjeDuvekotChannel)

Keep your balance

It's all about making your way through ordinary life and the trials thereof.  And not getting too caught up in the winds that blow and the momentary light afflictions.  Stay the course.

These are a few helpful areas to emphasize, so we can keep together in troubled times.

Human touch.  Make peace with those in your house.  Family and loved ones.  

The music is good.  Music to listen to, and music as music practice and lessons and preparing for performing and then performing.  Even for people in your house and on the street where you live.  Some people make online concerts, which can be as low key as you like.

Exercise.  My grandkids are into weightlifting and the like, but when the gyms closed, they stopped.  But that's just a hindrance, not a closed door.  I'm as low-key a fellow as you're likely to find, but even I have a treadmill that will work when I turn it on.  

Is this all?  Nope, not by a long shot.  Is it complete advice? Nah.  Is it something?  Well, yeah.  And, gotta say, it's what I've been landing on, to emphasize, to keep my own balance.  I didn't even mention the regular strategies.

A problem with giving and taking advice about how to get through life is that people have their own issues, circumstances, and so forth.  For instance, someone has trouble seeing.  So you say, my glasses helped me, here try them on.  What? They didn't help?