Note to Willis

[Bct...@aol.com]

Dear Willis,

 

Are you okay? I have been worried about you because you haven't written in to the Open Forum for a week now.  I hope all is well, and that you are either away or taking a breather. And I hope you will come back to us soon because I miss you. 

 

I haven't been able to respond to anything you have posted recently, because even though I have read it all at least twice, it was all over my head.   With that said, I miss the challenge and stimulation and growth that comes from at least making an attempt to enter into dialogue with you!

 

There are some things we never finished, in part because I was away myself for a few weeks.  I still owe you an answer on a mistake I made in Greek translation.  

 

And I think I will find some more of your Thinksheets and see if they fit with what's been going on in this Open Forum recently.  I did teach myself how to use that Scanner, which was a real pain in the neck, so I may as well put it to use! 

 

I hope you are doing well.

 

Jane

 

[Willis E. Elliott]

How kind of you, Jane!

 

My server cut me off more than a week ago: charter.net will no longer permit group-emails to more than 50 persons.  So at my computer nerd's suggestion, I asked Cliff Anderson to change my Open Forum address to gmail.  This is my first attempt at the new arrangement.  Please just email me "OK!" if you get this.

 

I have trouble believing that any posts of mine could be "all over my head."  If I could help you on any of that, it would help me & others.

 

Grace and peace--

Willis

[Bct...@aol.com]

OK!  I got your note, and I am so glad I e-mailed you!  This issue with ISPs not allowing people to do group e-mailing is really quite bad.  It is compromising our freedom.  And the freedom of the Spirit.  What are we going to do about it?

 

Dear Willis, I couldn't begin to tell you how your stuff is over my head... including your response to my response to one of your Thinksheets, and your most recent excellent and detailed response to Andy, which I read a few times.  I read your article on the Iran Turmoil from the Washington Post a few times too, and that was good.  But the rest of the stuff is just too difficult for me these days. 

 

So, I am just at this very moment going outside to sit on the deck with a beer, after having taken a very heated and rigorous walk, and I have your Thinksheet book and am going to flip through it. I see you have a Thinksheet entitled "Who are 'the poor'?" and I think I'll start with that, given our discussions in this Open Forum on economics. But given that they are your Thinksheets, please let me know if there are any you'd particularly like me to read and/or share with this Open Forum.

 

Glad you can send and receive mail.  All the best to you,

 

Jane

_______________________________________________________________________

[Willis E. Elliott]

Thanks, Jane.

 

Yes, there is a Thinksheet in (FLOW OF FLESH, REACH OF SPIRIT) I'd like responses to.  It's a poem in which I "define" a religious word ("sacrament") feeling-first instead of head-first.  In fact, it has no "head" at all.  /  Monday, I'm giving a lecture titled simply, "Language."  Maybe I'll start it by reading pp140-141.

1

Enlightenment victims, we need a bypass to get to the heart from the head.  Why?  Because we are in our heads.  Why?  Because school put us there.  Why?  Because the inventor of the computer said that's where we should be: essentially, in our essence, our being, we are thinkers who cook percepts of concretions into concepts of abstractions: I am because I think ("sum, ergo cogito") & my thinking is the evidence of my being [human] ("cogito, ergo sum" - Descartes [the first "modern" philosopher, d.1650]).

2

I've written the "Subject" (above) in Latin in the vein, & in reversal, of Descartes' most famous line.  Translation: Because I'm alive, I can feel/sense/perceive.  Because I can fee/sense/perceive as a human being, I can speak.  And because I can speak, I can think.  /  It is not true that love or a smile is the shortest distance between two hearts (though the entertainment world has capitalized on this sentiment).  In 1980, after a lecture, I was handed (by the poet) a book of poems titled "A Poem Is the Shortest Distance Between Two Hearts."  (Her name will come to me soon after I post this email to you.)

We are the language animal, & without language we have no human mind or even heart.

3

I'm overwhelmed with metaphors of what I mean, but must get to my daily walk with Loree.  I'll close with two brief stories on secularism's captivity of consciousness in the mind versus the heart. 

3.1

American poet W.S.Mervin went to college & lost the religion of his Presbyterian-parson father.  When Bill Moyers (6.26.09) asked him why he gave up Christianity, he smiled & said "The Apostles Creed."  He was wrong.

3.2

Billy Graham began his response to me (at the '66 NCC Triennium) thus: "Unlike Dr. Elliott, I am no scholar.  I didn't even get to go to seminary."  Why no seminary?  Fear.  The fear that he would lose his religion - specifically, his evangelistic passion.  He was right.

4

Well, one more story.  Someone please remind me who said, "Cursed be the man who handles holy things without feeling."  In training readers for public worship in our Cape Cod church, I would have him/her read the lection(s) for the upcoming Sunday with the public-address system on.  Then I would read it, & ask for comments on the differences.  Always, I'd get this comment: "You were slower."  Thoughts are rabbits, feelings are turtles.  If the reader feels nothing, the Scripture has been abused.  If the congregation feels nothing during the reading, the congregation has been abused & taught that Scripture-reading is not an important part of worship.  Human life is primarily feeling (*sentio*), secondarily talking (*loqui"), only tertiarily thinking (*cogito*).

 

Grace and peace--

Willis

----- Original Message -----

[Willis E. Elliott]

Dear Al

 

You ask, "Why do you suppose that God gave people minds and the ability to think?"  As your question is in response to my 6.30.09 to "Jane" (who was troubled that she could get everything I write on Our UCC Confessing Christ Open Forum), it's engaged, not innocent.  But I'll treat it here as a (somewhat) innocent question.

1

It seemed like a good idea at the time, & may even turn out to be so.  It's too early to tell.  It depends partly on whom you ask, mainly on how God feels about it (since he bears primary responsibility for it).  By the Bible's 3rd chapter, our minds had wandered away from God's thing to our thing - bathetically, toward Bernard Madoff's confession to the court day before yesterday that "I have left a legacy of shame to my children and grandchildren."  By the Bible's 6th chapter, God has concluded it was a bad idea: "everything they thought or imagined was consistently and totally evil" (vs.5).  But he went further: since thinking is inseparable from humanity, he is "sorry" (vss.6 & 7) he'd even made us, & decides to eliminate us (vs.7).  On second thought, he saved just enough human stock (one family, Noah's) to enable our species to continue.....which raises the question whether that was a good idea, instead of starting afresh (as Obama hoped to do, but couldn't).

2

The biblical premise appearing in your question is that the evolutionary co-emergence, in our species, of mouth (language) & mind (string-thinking, di- & con-vergent threads of consciousness) was by DD (divine design, which is more than ID [intelligent design]).  The biblical assumption is that this type of free-radical creaturely consciousness was necessary to the divine purpose, which is also the answer to your question "why?": mutually satisfying conversation, during evening walks (3.8-10), between the Creator & (Gn.2.15) the gardener.  Then, one day, evening comes, we don't show up for the communion-walk, & God calls for us ("Where are you?" - 3.9).  Were we to be incapable of independent thinking, love as mutually chosen could not exist; no love, no communion; no communion, no creaturely life-recognition of the Creator as Source, Center, & Destiny (no "do all to the glory of God" - 1Cor.10.31).

3

We Christians believe that this divine desire for communion led God, by stages of increasing involvement in human life, to become a human being, live with us, teach us, die with & for us, & invite us to follow him through gates of new life.  For all this, God has give us the necessary potentials (capacities), which we can (in the words of geophysicist Xavier Le Pichon) "develop or destroy."  (He developed the first tectonic-plates geo-model, showed that the fragility of earth's crust [evidenced in volcanos & tsunamis] is essential to the biosphere; teaches that the human intentional distinctive is caring for the fragile/vulnerable/disabled/suffering/dying [he lives in a L'Arche community]; & sees Jesus' cross as the supreme revelation of the divine nature: God's "image" in us is our capacity for empathy: in moving toward Christ's cross, we are delivered [saved] from destructively running away from fragility [including our own fears, losses, griefs. mortality]; & when we move toward others' fragility, we are moving toward Christ's cross & the fulfillment of our own humanity.

4

Al, I do not believe in progress.  I believe in God, the deity of the biblical narratives (which, by their vary nature, invitive us to read them imaginatively), whose kingdom will come (as the Lord's Prayer says) "on earth as it is in heaven" in God's time & way, including Jesus' second parousia (presence, "coming").

But, toward that "end" (as purpose & fulfillment), I observe progress in the convergence of evolutions/awarenesses.  Al, recently you accused me of simultaneously riding two horses, the biblical & the modern.  But I am more guilty than that!  I ride any horse I can head toward the Cross, the Resurrection, & the Life Eternal for my neighbor & myself.

 

Grace and peace--

Willis

 

----- Original Message -----

From: Alfred Bloom

To: Willis E. Elliott

Sent: Wednesday, July 01, 2009 2:13 AM

Subject: Re: *Sum, ergo sentio, ergo loqui, ergo cogito* (I am, therefore I feel/speak/think): NOT *cogito, ergo sum* (Descartes)

Dear Willis:

 

Why do you suppose that God gave people minds and ability to think?

 

Aloha

Al