cuaderno b

I need to be in prettier places more. Ugliness is killing me.

A friend sent me this text yesterday. Like he has, I’ve watched our world become increasingly coarse in the years after the Covid behavioral control experiment.

Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.

"As Chesterton tells us. . .'To say that love is God is romantic idealism; to say that God is love is either the last straw or the ultimate truth.' Lewis explained that 'in the christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion, but an act of the will.' When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling. You can as well produce a cozy emotional feeling on demand as you can a yawn or a sneeze. On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sesne of being willing to work for their well being, even if it means sometimes just leaving them alone. Thus in Jesus' terms we can love our neighbors without necessarily liking them. In fact, liking them may stand in the way of loving them by making us overprotective sentimentalists instead of reasonably honest helpers. When Jesus talked to the Pharisees, he didn't say, 'There, there, everything's going to be all right.' He said, 'You brood of vipers! How can you speak of good when you are evil?' And he said that because he loved them."

"The Gospels are far from clear as to just what happened. It began in the dark. The stone had been rolled aside. Matthew alone speaks of an earthquake. In the tomb there were two white-clad figures or possibly just one. Mary Magdalen seems to have gotten there before anybody else. There was a man she thought at first was the gardener. Perhaps Mary the mother of James was with her and another woman named Joanna. One account says Peter came too with one of the other disciples. Elsewhere the suggestion is that there were only the women and that the disciples, who were somewhere else, didn't believe the women's story when they heard it. There was the sound of people running, of voices. Matthew speaks of "fear and great joy." Confusion was everywhere. There is no agreement even as to the role of Jesus himself. Did he appear at the tomb or only later? Where? To whom did he appear? What did he say? What did he do?

It is not a major production at all, and the minor attractions we have created around it — the bunnies and baskets and bonnets, the dyed eggs — have so little to do with what it's all about that they neither add much nor subtract much. It's not really even much of a story when you come right down to it, and that is of course the power of it. It doesn't have the ring of great drama. It has the ring of truth. I f the Gospel writers had wanted to tell it in a way to convince the world that Jesus indeed rose from the dead, they would presumably have done it with all the skill and fanfare they could muster. Here there is no skill, no fanfare. They seem to be telling it simply the way it was. The narrative is as fragmented, shadowy, incomplete as life itself. When it comes to just what happened, there can be no certainty. That something unimaginable happened, there can be no doubt.

The symbol of Easter is the empty tomb."

I look at my records from other years: Today I might see a palm warbler. I go down to the woods and see a palm warbler. Nothing else seems stable. And maybe by next year this won't be either but for now I can check and see when the swifts will come back, when I might see a house wren, a catbird, a wood thrush, and then have a chance of seeing them.

Another thing: I used to want to go to far-flung places to see exciting exotic birds in their habitat. Now there is literally no bird more magical than the ones that show up right here in my garden and the ones I can see in the woods near my house.

Look! These are the descendants of deeply ancient lineages and right now they happen to be in this little part of the world with me. What an honour!

Study this. No cell phone. No "wearable" to monitor his health. Just a man dressed smartly, walking somewhere with a nice umbrella in case it is needed. Prepared.

I wish I could see his shoes. Betting they are shined without white soles.

Look at the purpose in his eyes.