One More Night

 I put in my time at work, after misadventuring on my way there. The #5 got me to the bus station 2 minutes late for my connection to the number #3. I meant to take the #6 and walk over from Walnut. I went down Jackson to the Village Pantry for smokes and missed the #6. I also got caught in the rain. The 4 pm #3 got me close, and I got to work late. The weather being windy and wet, I got a taxi back here and have been here since a little after 8 pm.

No schedule yet. I might work Saturday. So far I like the place.

I am tired and have been doing some reading. The writing I will take up again tomorrow.

Thursday night's reading:

5 Crime Novels That Deepen Our Understanding of Collective Trauma  was not quite as enlightening as I hoped.

The Sinking of the Gloucester: The Shipwreck That Made 17th Century England Tremble, also not quite as much as I hoped for.

The “Kairos” of the Late Metropolitan of Pergamon John D. Zizioulas is quite provocative and will be on my mind for some time.

The question that naturally arises is why an eminent hierarch, a profound and informed theologian like Metropolitan John, insisted so much on the importance and centrality of eschatology for the life and theology of the Church, when indeed eschatology inevitably leads to repentance for the past and to the liberation of the future? Is it possible that he did not understand that the eschatological perspective would inevitably lead to painful revisions on difficult issues such as those of otherness, gender, anthropology, or ethics, when, for example, he wrote as early as 1968 on the controversial issue of women’s ordination that “Orthodox theologians could find no theological reasons against such an ordination. Yet the entire matter is so deeply tied up with their tradition that they would find it difficult in their majority to endorse without reservations the rather enthusiastic statements of the paper”? In the light, then, of this eschatological orientation, we can better understand the position he expressed from the podium of the Volos Academy for Theological Studies, in February 2001, regarding the consequences of the eschatological ethos of the Church, and more specifically his opinion that the future is not determined by the past, but that on the contrary the future liberates from the past, just as in Christian thought and life we travel back in time: from the future to the present and the past, and therefore the future is the cause—not the effect—of the past, since the world was created for the eschatological Christ who will come at the eschaton as the union of the created and the uncreated, while the eschaton give entity to the first, and eschatology to protology. As a natural consequence of the above, Zizioulas argued that the

“Church is not what it is or what it was, but what it will be [at the eschaton],” just as the sinner, in turn, “is not defined ontologically by what was, but by what will be [at the eschaton].” That is why he pointed out that “the secularization of the Church involves not only institutional questions (such as the relationship between the Church and the state, or the Church and society, and more), but also ethical issues. […] The Church must not adopt society’s attitudes toward ethical matters; rather, it must spread throughout society the spirit of forgiveness and love, which allows the future to release human beings from the past. An unforgiving Church is a secularized Church, because unwillingness to forgive is a characteristic of this world and worldly ethics.”

Anyone of the Christian faith should find this eye-opening theology.

 Raquel Welch: a strong and powerful personality with a rarely-tapped gift for comedy, something far from the previous piece, but she was a cultural icon for me. I strongly agree with the writer of this piece – an underrated actress.

In the ring with Mailer – The Times Literary Supplement reviews a bunch of books on and by Mailer, a writer I have never quite a handle on but whose personality spilled out beyond merely writing books to be a Novelist, one of those  creatures known even if not read.

Done.

sch 10:16 pm