listen, resonate, don't appropriate

Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?

Joan Jeanrenaud and her Ice Cello, a mixture of art installation and musical performance enhanced by the dripping of the ice provides us with a very fragile and vulnerable image of voice.

In my course we were given a reading from Jung Young Lee's Marginality a book I read 10 years ago. This drove me back to my Master's thesis and the importance of listening without an appropriating ear. Many people claim to speak from the margins but Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has asked whether true marginal people can ever speak because in being heard i.e. having a voice they either become part of the dominant centre or they are appropriated. Some of the worst compassion I have ever heard has been I know how you feel because (this...) and (that...) happened to me. No-one can ever know how another feels. The supposed listener has hijacked the pain of the other. They have neglected the fragility of others.

Over the years I have learned to talk less and listen more. Gabriel Marcel, a Christian existential philosopher, introduce to me the notion that to be truly present to another person is to be available to them. That I think is a challenge to any relationship and perhaps at the core of what any spirituality should be about.

'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' ... 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' Matt 22:37, 39

collective nouns

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. ... Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind John Donne

The Kobe International Cello Festival was an incredible gathering of cellist 500 or 1,000 cellists!

What do you call a large group of cellists? No, not an orchestra but according to wikipedia they are a parenthesis of cellists. Can we believe them given the claim of rigged and biased information and even fake authorities posting articles? A flock of geese and a herd of cows and even a pod of whales but a parenthesis of cellists?

This year the trees have resisted giving up their leaves until the rain and snow fall of this last week. But now there are carpets of leaves under the trees. What can I believe and what do I believe? We need a collective to believe, we need relationship to truly believe, to have faith.

The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingrafted into the body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves...

This quote comes from Meditation XVII from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions by the metaphysical poet John Donne. This meditation focuses on the collective or communal aspect of church in which the interconnection between each person and each part is important.

Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. Romans 12:4-5