Back to the Beginning

I've been thinking for some time that I should revisit the amount of time and energy that I spend online, the groups to which I've linked, and so forth.  Dropped some groups -- and I think for the time being I'll focus on blogging rather than Facebook chat -- and try to find a register other than X-Snark, which was beginning to prevail.

I found a thing in a long-since-purchased, not-read, book -- or rather "yet another book of which I read the first nineteen pages" -- so maybe I'll start (over) with this.  Because it seems apt and helpful -- it's from Jane Redmont's When in  Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life, and it's by Dorothee Soelle, whose writing I've enjoyed.  I don't go her whole journey with her, but this piece resonated. It's about the difficulty of faith and the unpalatability of unfaith, I guess.

I don't as they put it believe in god
but to him I cannot say no hard as I try
take a look at him in the garden
when his friends ran out on him
his face wet with fear
and with the spit of his enemies
him I have to believe

Him I can't bear to abandon
to the great disregard for life
to the monotonous passing of millions of years
to the moronic rhythm of work leisure and work
to the boredom we fail to dispel
in cars in beds in stores

That's how it is they say what do you want
uncertain and not uncritically
I subscribe to the other hypothesis
which is his story
that's not how it is he said for god is
and he staked his life on this claim

Thinking about it I find
one can't let him pay alone
for his hypothesis
so I believe him about
god
The way one believes another's laughter
his tears
or marriage or no for an answer
that's how you'll learn
to believe him about life
promised to all.                                   --Dorothee Soelle

So there you have it.  That's enough for today, or any today when you wake up wondering whether there is any remaining shred of plausibility in what we think we were called, trained, commissioned -- and paid -- to proclaim.