Ecclesiastes 3.1-11

This was the first reading at Mass yesterday 28th Sept. Worth reflection I think at times like these when we need the better part of each couplet to make its mark.
3 There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
2 a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
3 a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
4 a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
5 a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
6 a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
7 a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
8 a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
9 What do workers gain from their toil?
10 I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race.
11 He has made everything beautiful in its time.
He has also set eternity in the human heart;
yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

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Fear the politicians of the future – Eureka Street

Fear the politicians of the future – Eureka Street.

A Big Problem for over half a million Australians

Zac Alstin in an article in EUREKA STREET.COM.AU on 17th Sept draws attention to the difficulties faced by people with a mental disability to deal with the increasing demand on us individually to cope with technology in the market place. This is just an excerpt from his very readable article.

“Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter exemplify the ways in which new technology continues to draw out and emphasise the life of the mind above all else. At the same time, convenient new tools like online banking and shopping carry a hidden burden of knowledge, memory, and comprehension borne entirely by the individual user. The cognitive demands of active social participation have never been so high.
We seem set on a trajectory of ever increasing reliance on individual autonomy, rationality, and self-awareness augmented by complex technologies. But if our culture glorifies the mental life of the autonomous, empowered individual, what does it offer those whose mental faculties are limited or impaired?
We are living in what ethicist Stephen G. Post has called a ‘hyper-cognitive’ society — a society which not only demands but idealises the mental life as the essence of personhood and individuality. Post has critiqued our present culture’s implicit affront to people suffering cognitive deficits such as dementia:
I associate hypercognitive values with the Enlightenment notion of salvation by reason alone and suggest that this imperils people with dementia. Very simplistically, ‘I think, therefore I am,’ implies that if I do not think, I am not. In essence, the values of rationality and productivity blind us to other ways of thinking about the meaning of our humanity.”

US ELECTION

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current-events, politics

I MOSTLY ENJOY THE DAILY OUTPUT FROM EUREKA.COM. This is a Jesuit managed online magazine.
Today Jim McDermott S.J.who is currently studying screenwriting at UCLA has amusingly described the two Conventions probably using some of his newfound skills.
His article begins “The United States finished Act One of its quadrennial orgiastic political kabuki…..”
and goes on to make a further comment that Romney made lots of pitches to family and faith: All the laws and legislation in the world will never heal this world like the loving hearts and arms of mothers and fathers.
‘Too many lines like that he says, will put you into a diabetic coma(even in the States)’
As a Jesuit He misses out by not saying that if this were universally sincerely meant and understood the statement would not be far from the truth.

The People Problem

Australia still can’t see the error of its ways. It signed up to an international agreement yet chooses not to comply with the terms of it.
This appeared in an article in Eureka in 2008. Four years on the comments remain ever more relevant
….All ideologies…. can neglect the view of the human world on which they are based and focus simply on implementing the consequences of their ideas. They can ally themselves with centres of power that distracts them from the vital conversation about human life.
When this happens the costs in human misery are great. But it doesn’t have to be this way. If we insist that conversation should turn to what is important, to what matters to human beings, theories can be nurtured and disciplined so they are not easily corrupted.

Higgs Boson

There is an amazing amount of instructive info on this new ‘hot’particle on Utube. It is mostly available if you search under PHYSICS. It was while doing that that I came across a talk by the Indian mystic Sri Sri Ravi Shankar under the Higgs boson title. This encompasses a Vedic slant. Taken apart it is easy to see how it is tangential to Christian theology, bound up in phrases like ‘being and not being’ before creation and outside as many parallel universes as you may care to imagine. This talk explains the need to take meditation far back and then even further and beyond that! No surprise how much Thomas Merton found it interesting. The only ? Is his suggestion that even the Gods only came into being after creation but there he must mean the Hindu gods. I will certainly visit his take on particle physics again if only to see the engrossed look on the faces of his audience which would probably have been on mine too!