Dervala Hanley rides the most dangerous road in the world and lives to tell the tale. We switched to the left-hand side for the official start of the crazy Coroico road. Downhill traffic drove closest to the drop, and had to yield to vehicles going uphill to La Paz. This was terrifying. The edge of the road often crumbled to nothing, and often there was only room for one car, requiring slow backward creeps around blind corners. The locals weren’t bothered, blithely overtaking on these corners with Pachamama’s drunken blessing. The honks of the oncoming trucks, above and below, made …
For perhpas my last little entry on Pentecost, have a look at AKMA�s Pentecost Sermon: Now, you may have noticed that that kind of humble, forgiving love doesn�t just spring up in fountains all over the place. That love, that humility, that forgiveness come down to us as a gift, and our best efforts can�t make that gift come. But we can learn to be ready, we can practice the craft of forgiveness, the attitude of humility, so that the Spirit finds in us a limberness for the labor of love. Indeed, when divine love meets spiritual limberness, why, there�s …
Courtesy of whiskey river comes this quote from Ludwig van Beethoven, which beautifully captures the notion that “spirit must rise from the earth” even if it seems to reside in the sky: Here, surrounded by the products of nature, often I sit for hours, while my senses feast upon the spectacle of nature. Here the majestic sun is not concealed by any dirty roof made by human hands, here the blue sky is my sublime roof. When in the evening I contemplate the sky in wonder and the host of luminous bodies continually revolving within their orbits, suns or earths …
So what is troubling me about the Pentecost is the way it seemed to birth hierarchy, right out of thin air (pun intended). To do this of course, requires that you believe that Spirit is also authority and that Spirit comes from above. Both of those assumptions, it seems to me were to have devastating consequences over the next 2000 years. First of all, if Spirit is also authority, then the apostles became the first anointed Christian priests, ordained by Spirit itself to spread the message that Jesus Christ had been teaching before he was executed. The Church began, and …
Pentecost, from the Ingebord Psalter c.1210 Synergy reminds me that yesterday was Pentecost in the Christian calender. This day commerates the day the Apostles were visited by a “Comforter,” Spirit itself. This must have been a transcendant mystical experience. Gnostics for example look to the Pentecost as the pinnacle of the Gnostic mystical journey, looking to me a lot like a collective Buddhist awakening experience: To know the event of Pentecost as an immanent and interior reality is the goal towards which the Gnostic’s striving is always directed. If we are to know this other Comforter, we must somehow come …