NOBLE ROT II

Noble Rot

This story was in the wine.  A wine bottle presented the issue of identity.  Where was it from?  Anyone was like a wine.  The answer from a stranger would reveal something.  Like a bottle of wine, about your tradition, your exposure to the sun, to climates, to the land, a place of ideas and ideals on how to develop.  In advance, at the wine shop, people in search of a wine, with a desire for something, still liked to have an expectation, a sense of the taste inside the bottle.   And this land, its make up, would determine what would happen to the grapes.   Expectations of a wine critic were like the expectations at a movie: To come to the theater with no expectations resulted in true joy when the consumer was overcome by what wine could taste like, move her/him to jubilation.   The French had a term for wine called “noble rot.”  So did God evolve? 

 Was every year different?  This story was in the wine.  When I was 14 years old, I was taught a class by Wild Bill Ozark with the name ”Salvation History.”  Wild Bill is long sinse dead.  But of late, I think often of that course.  Especially at Easter.  For me, there was an ever visble theme to world history.  And “Salvation History” seemed to include the infinite time when God lived alone in the heavens with His creative impulses.  And all along he kept trying.  When he formed man in his image and likeness, men and women kept trying.  Again and again, people failed.  The story of Abram and Isaac seem to fortell the story of Easter. “Salvation History”  seemed to apply for world history as well as some kind of personal history, where no matter who we are, everyone at some point, each person, personally fails. 

 Resurrection consequentially is about forgiveness.  Resurrection was God’s diivine way to demonstrate that all of history was about the attempt to keep trying.  Woman, Man, generation after generation of people, people I have met and people I never knew, some related to me, have kept trying.  People of Ireland who formed a nation once again on Easter.  People whose DNA I shared.  People who forgave and started over, with the resolve to try to do good. 

 Noble rot.  Because we were divine, from age to age, from east to west,  we all were here to keep trying.   Salvation History was that story about God, demonstrated in the tradition of  Abraham who really had lived.  Moses was a true person.  David had actually ruled as king.  And Jesus had really lived and died.  That was the story of Advent that led to Easter.  Expectations.  Scribes and Pharisees who had their own expectations.  This story was in the wine.  People who had not been open to a new wine, were not open to a developing story, like people I knew alive today.  The story of Jesus was not about how he was put to death, about man’s inhumanity to man, but the purpose of His life was about re-birth, resurrection and an afterlife.  His life was about the meaning of all history.  The story this year was in the wine.   

The vintage was all about a new season.  It was all aabout starting over and trying again. 

 

 So did God evolve?  Was every year different?  Is he still growing with the world population?  In love?  It was all about relationships that lasted.  That was true romance, with relationships that ring true. Love,  with God and a partner.  It’s part of the romantic tragedy of our age that our partners must be seen as compatible on every level.  Sometime a relationship ended up as some kind of private fantasy where, “sometimes end up liking the same things for vastly different reasons.  And they build up these whole private fantasy lives around the meaning of these supposedly shared books, shared music, only to discover too late that the other person had a different fantasy completely.”  And it was false.  There was certitude instead of doubt.  Was your relationships with God, with friends, one that had developed and lasted over time?  And was the taste one to be savored?   

 

Noble Rot

This story was in the wine.  A wine bottle presented the issue of identity.  Where was it from?  Anyone was like a wine.  The answer from a stranger would reveal something.  Like a bottle of wine, about your tradition, your exposure to the sun, to climates, to the land, a place of ideas and ideals on how to develop.  In advance, at the wine shop, people in search of a wine, with a desire for something, still liked to have an expectation, a sense of the taste inside the bottle.   And this land, its make up, would determine what would happen to the grapes.   Expectations of a wine critic were like the expectations at a movie:  To come to the theater with no expectations resulted in true joy when the consumer was overcome by what wine could taste like, move her/him to jubilation.  That was the story of Advent that led to Easter.  This story was in the wine. 

 The French had a term for wine called “noble rot.”  Scribes and Pharisees who had their own expectations, people who were not open to a developing story, had not been open to a new wine.  

 So did God evolve?  Was every year different?  

Director of Player Development

Who do you think you are?  It took a few years of schooling to come up with the answer. 

 

Development was about the day a young man or woman realized how to use to a degree the things that were given at birth.  The DNA.  The inheritance of the surivors of the fittest.  Where you went to high school, who were your classmates, determined a lot about your identity.  Beginning with your family, expanding to your friends, an identity came from an inheritance of some kind.  To be an African-Americana, a Haitian, an Irishmen was to inherit a changing form of slavery, making a glorious burden into a glorious tradition, where a future generation of beneficiaries were formed by the histories of a people.   

 Identity:  Vivaldi’s message was found in the gandeur of his Gloria in D major, which in the same music that he composed for the Sanctus, he was equating Jesus the Messiah with the Glory of God in Heaven, in the Gloria. 

The development of the question of a child, “Who do you think you are?” to the question of the New testament,“Who do you say that I am?” 

 

 

 

Charlie the Tuna

It was the last Friday for 46 more weeks of the rule imposed of abstaining from meat.  I had started to wonder if this was one way to honor all those fishermen with whom Jesus hung out.  In a home that observed the pre-Vatican II statutes, we always had canned tuna.  It seemed a custom akin to eating cat food.  I hated tuna from the can.  It was a luxury in those days to be with my paternal grandparents on a Friday night, who always ate canned salmon.  My grandfather who had married a non-Catholic in the days when there was discomfort over such integration, had made a promise to his wife to ban tuna fish in his home before he was allowed to consummate his marriage.  As he got older, he thought it the best decision he had ever made.         

Humanity/Divinity, Part II

God was revealed to me in my worship, from my worship. Oh so gradually.  Faith.  It did not seem to be much.  But it did grow, with action.  And one day you woke up with more faith, having seen the displays of God’s wonder.  Spiritual development: at what age?  The physical part of the body ached after a while when it had no physical muscles.  And was the same principal at work concerning the spiritual muscles.  How about the spiritual part, the spiritual identity, the part of me that I felt when there were no photos, not mirrors to look at.  Who was I?  Was the “to know God?” part of faith, part of religion?   Was the “to know” part of identity of God, and the identity of me?  

 The God question should be as exciting as my prayer.  It should involve identity. And based upon His son, I suspect that a large part of the identity of the Creator involved suffering, in the daily gift to sustain life and keep this world turning.  And I suspect that the innate human drive to work was actually divine.  Many had difficulty wit the absolute awe that there was a God without trying to figure out why.  There was enough difficulty in the life of a being, any being, as with any love, to answer the question of why about themselves, without having to figure out the reason for God. Love was not a science.  Nor was God.