Seeking Wisdom

The Gospel Acclamation for today is John 8:31-32 “If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, says the Lord.” Which is a nice promise. That’s the kind of reward we hope for from following Christ. But there’s something to be gained from looking at a slightly different version of this acclamation. “Si se mantienen fieles a mi palabra, dice el Señor, serán verdaderamente discípulos míos y conocerán la verdad.” The practice of looking at biblical verses in a foreign language is pretty common in sermons and homilies, though people usually seem to look at the Greek or Hebrew as they’re closer to the original Gospels in terms of number of translations. I’m looking at Spanish because I don’t speak Greek, Hebrew, or Latin, but also because I think there’s always something to be gained by observing scripture through a slightly different prism. One thing that shines through this passage is the verb “to know.” In English we have no ...

What does it mean to talk to someone? To be painfully analytical: My brain sends impulses to mouth, lips, and tongue to coordinate with my diaphragm and conjure a complex mixture of fricative and non-fricative sounds at a volume loud enough to be audible so that somebody else’s ears can perceive that pressure wave through a mechanism that’s far too complicated for me to understand or explain, ultimately sending an electrical signal to their brain with some message that I did or did not intend. That gets interpreted and so on. Cartesian Dualism bookends this process with two souls that possess wills that manipulate those brains and so on down the line. So what we really mean when we say we’re talking to someone is that we’re making noise with our body (probably, hopefully, meaningful) and that other person’s body has the machinery to decode that meaningful noise, if we speak the same language. Who’s the “we” here? Is it that thing Descartes would call a soul, or the bodies ...

Ephesians 5:18 – “And do not get drunk on wine, in which lies debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit.” Surely this is an injunction against going farther with a girl than you would have had you been sober. Surely this is an injunction against getting too drunk at a family party and cussing loudly in front of your young cousins. And this is most certainly an order to stop the behavior that leads you to be passed out on a riverbank, too drunk to stand even after you’ve puked five times, so that your friend has to carry you to the nearest road, where you get picked up by a guy in a pickup truck who won’t let you sit in the cab so you lay in the bed like roadkill.               Then he says that you should spend “a little more time reading the good book and a little less with the fourteen extra,” whatever that means. Talk about providing witness.            ...