334 • Sole-searching
I hoped to make sense of your views
By walking a mile in your shoes.
But one glimpse of the soles
Scorched by burning hot coals
Means I need no additional clues.
Let us pause, this morning, to think back over the long, dark history of Western culture. It may perhaps be illuminating to try to pinpoint the moment when the ascetic and the self-harmer ceased to be considered uplifting role-models.
2 thoughts on “334 • Sole-searching”
And I think an interesting reflection for Advent Sunday – beginning with Cranmer’s magnificent Collect:
Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Tomorrow I shall begin reading Russell Hoban’s PILGERMANN
Dear Patrick,
I’m particularly glad to detect your engagement with one of the many sermons at ‘My Dog Errol’ (they’re generally the bulletins in the pale blue panels, I think, though perhaps not always). Would that my meditations could hold even the feeblest candle to the elegance and precision of Archbishop Cranmer’s proclamation. Or those of Russell Hoban, for that matter. I’ve never known anyone able to read ‘Pilgermann’ for long … not because they cast the book aside in bewilderment or contempt, but because it is so intensely addictive – in terms both of its imagination and its doctrinal scope – that one can scarcely fail to devour it in one (albeit uncomfortably protracted) sitting.
Best wishes
Richard