the serious drying phase

No rain again. But we still have surface water out back by the patio, and the ground will slosh under my feet out front. At least we are in the serious drying phase. And there’s no rain in the forecast.

Sammy is going bonkers, though. I’m thinking: maybe they can go out in two days, and this would be forcing it. But I’m wondering if maybe tomorrow could work. How many days have they been penned up indoors? I wish I kept track. The cats need some serious quality time outdoors and soon.

W.W.J.D.?

In his foreward, titled “Christ Not a Christian”, Garry Wills immediately impresses upon the reader’s mind the majestic, supernatural conception that he has of Jesus. Jesus is not merely a great teacher or even an inspiring prophet. He opens with the popular meme “W.W.J.D.”, arguing that it is misguided, if not absurd, to propose that anyone should act as God: “Jesus ghosted in and out of people’s lives, blessing and cursing, curing and condemning. If he was not God, he was a standing blasphemy against God.” A Christian follows Christ; he does not try to act like the Boss, so to speak. The key idea behind W.W.J.D. is that of a “gentle Jesus meek and mild”. Wills points out that Jesus was much more than that, and we will use his quote from Chesterton to bring this point home.

_ _ _

We have all heard people say a hundred times over, for they seem never to tire of saying it, that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed a most merciful and humane lover of humanity, but that the Church has hidden this human character in repellent dogmas and stiffened it with ecclesiastical terrors till it has taken on an inhuman character. This is, I venture to repeat, very nearly the reverse of the truth. The truth is that it is the image of Christ in the churches that is almost entirely mild and merciful. It is the image of Christ in the gospels that is a good many other things as well. The figure in the gospels does indeed utter in words of almost heartbreaking beauty his pity for our broken hearts. But they are very far from being the only sort of words that he utters.... There is something appalling, something that makes the blood run cold, in the idea of having a statue of Christ in wrath. There is something insupportable even to the imagination in the idea in turning the corner of a street or coming out into the spaces of a market-place, to meet the petrifying petrifaction of that figure as it turned upon a generation of vipers, or that face as it looked at the face of the hypocrite.... [The gospel story] is full of sudden gestures evidently significant except that we hardly know what they signify; of enigmatic silences; of ironical replies. The outbreaks of wrath, like storms above our atmosphere, do not seem to break out exactly where we would expect them, but to follow some higher weather chart of their own.

-- G. K. Chesterton

Quote of the Day

“The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.”

-- Albert Camus