Monday, August 27, 2012

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23


Pentecost +14 - Year B


Our primary experience is not repeatable and yet we institute traditions to keep it going, even if in a secondary way. Eventually our tradition becomes our primary experience and we are frozen into our explanation, not our experience.

Every generation needs to wrestle with this phenomena of locating experience rather than carrying it with us as preparation for a next experience.

In the time of American Empire we are facing this as we exhaust an old experience of finding a sense of freedom in a new configuration of community. Our traditions of such have led us to a time confusion and an attempt to find a new configuration of community in an extreme freedom for the individual where each person is responsible for their own outcome.

A review of communal karma would be helpful but we have so indoctrinated ourselves and left my thinking outside of your critique and vice versa that we have no way to evaluate expected consequences and appropriate risk.

Freedom, individual, community are all excellent words and holders of deep vision. Left to their own devices, outside of relationship, they are no longer nourishing, but each defiles the other. As each becomes filled with too much of itself we find their various extremes unbalanced and unbalancing.

Out of tradition comes frozen experience. Out of freedom comes fascism. Out of individuals comes narcissism. Out of community comes tribalism.

May Pentecost revive your appreciation of communal karma and from your experience of resurrection come the basis re-experiencing primary experience in all its raw wind and fire.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thank you for blessing us with your response.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.