Holding onto hope

[sacredpoultry]

My surgery the Monday before Thanksgiving was a successful one. I got my two pins out of my arm, the plates and screws are staying for the indefinite future. As of now I'm relatively painfree but I have a hard time dealing with the no driving addendum. One the one hand I feel perfectly capable of small drives (nothing on the freeway of course) but

Comments

[earthdown]

I doubted the wrath of a painting would be all that severe. Nice.

I found the naming thing particularly interesting, as it's played such a role in Christian theologies. Colonial missionaries renamed indigenous peoples as a part of their new life with God, but on the flip side of that, the renaming also stripped away a part of their identity within their own culture. For this reason, I suppose, I was rather dismayed when Kelly came back from Southeast Asia and told me about how they'd given the people they visited English names, up until she said she'd also received a Korean(?) one. To me, it's different when there's an exchange, rather than one culture imposing on another.

I think naming is still particularly important to the Catholic Church, as my cousin took on a saint's name in her confirmation ceremony in January. Did you have any of this cultural/historical bizness in mind when you wrote that element? Does Doc's reaction reflect your own views on a religion's right to rename its faithful?

[sacredpoultry]

I doubt I had a specific cultural context in mind. Convictions and ascensions should be enriching your identity, not dismantling or replacing it. Sure there is repentance from identities which bring chaos and pain into the world, but you don't have to have a change of culture to have a change of spirit. I'm unsure as to what area Kelly served in Asia, but I agree. In fact I think many missionary tragedies could have been avoided had these missionaries cared to engage the native people in their own cultural context instead of marrying the Gospel with Western ideals. I don't have a problem with a dynamic and growing identity as that it what is natural (You've been a sister, a daughter and a friend, but now you're also a wife!) but unless you're holding onto identities that are damaging to yourself or others, I see no reason to have to abandon them. My major point was religion divorced from wisdom and understanding is always self worship, an easy trap for the Pretender to fall into.

[earthdown]

I was trying to think of a religion divorced from wisdom and understanding, and I couldn't (except maybe scientology but perhaps that's too easy a mark ;-). I suppose it's people who claim a faith but have divorced their behavior from its principles, somehow. These are the people who, I find, most often do the whole holier-than-thou thing, which is a mark of pride rather than humility. Very interesting! But then I don't know if there's anything redeeming that once lay under the rituals you wrote about. Perhaps there is still distance between intent and interpretation -- such is writing.

That's a good point about broadening identities rather than replacing them. It's how I understood my cousin's ceremony as well -- still Ashley, now Cecilia too.

And glad the surgery went well, by the way! Hope you get your well-deserved vacation.

[sacredpoultry]

I'm sorry, I failed to differentiate religion (the practice of a belief system) from a Religion (an organized set of beliefs, practices, and people who ascribe to them). I agree that no one Religion is completely divorced from wisdom. But there are many believers of every religion whose practices are divorced from thought. They may be cultural believers, where religion = ethnicity (My grandmother was Catholic, as was my mother, as am I), or those of "blind faith" who perform rituals but couldn't explain to you why they do so or what they signify, or also those who wield religion as a tool to attain power, popularity or manipulate a population, such as political leaders or some clergy

[brogaglas]

That metal plate is a potentially-bullet-stopping defense built into ytour own arm. By strict definitions, you are now a cyborg. Then again, so is anyone with a wheelchair or a pair of glasses, but your mechanical component is cooler by far. I'll call it Step One.

[sacredpoultry]

I believe it is titanium, so no metal detectors or MRIs should interfere with it. I have thought that it would serve as an appropriate anchor for future cyberkinetic developments. Perhaps Apple and Merck will combine to form some extremely evil, but incredibly slick biotech.